Publishing
Scientific journals
Creating black & white plates for publishing in scientific journals is easy to do, but you need to find out several things before you start. Does your journal and its publishing house accept illustrations in electronic form on disk? If so, at what line screen is the journal published? If it doesn't accept illustrations in electronic form on disk, you can still create your plates in Photoshop, only the final product you send with the manuscript will be different (see Film below). Most journals that publish through Allen Press should accept illustrations in electronic form on disk since Allen Press does. When we called Allen Press, who publishes our journal Mycologia, their art director gave us the guidelines for making the plates. Mycologia is printed at 175 line screen so we need to create my plates at 350 dpi resolution. Other journals print at a lower line screen and so the resolution of images should be lower. You should always match your resolution with that of the printer output. If you send a file at too high resolution to a printer that doesn't print at that high a resolution, it will spend a lot of time determining which pixel information it should discard and this will degrade the final image. There are restrictions for the fonts on figures: do not use Adobe Postscript fonts, TrueType fonts or system bitmap fonts. Helvetica is a good choice. The images should be saved in the TIFF format with LZW compression selected.
Film
If your journal does not accept illustrations in electronic form on disk, you still have one option. The final plates on disk can be brought to your local service bureau (typographer, digital imaging company, [not Kinkos, copy services don't have the high quality printers needed]) and have your plate printed out on film. They will use a high resolution printer (e.g. 3048 dpi), but be sure to specify line screen. The film can be sent with your manuscript as the originals for the plate. Any publisher should be able to print directly from the film. These films will run $20-$25 each depending on the size (8.5 x 11 to 11 x 17).
Posters
Video images can also be used for creating posters in Adobe Illustrator. A digital imaging service bureau will print it on a large 36" wide, color, 300 dpi inkjet printer.