I have been doing research for a little over 5 years now. By now I have been exposed to a lot of the traditional pet peeves of a research career. The experimental errors being much more than the experimental reading itself, the computational models not even remotely matching experimental results, the funding crunch ensuring that you can't buy that $2000 part you need to get your machine working again. But the one thing that gives me the most sleepless nights is "Redoing the figures in the paper to fit the journal requirements"!
Someone once told me "A figure speaks a 1000 words". I took that advice a little too seriously. My average paper has at least 2 figures per page. And this is great until I have to submit the final version of the journal article for archival. A standard comment that I get in almost every review of a paper I have submitted is:
Your figures do not meet the journal requirements
1. Figures must be submitted separately, each as a separate file. Acceptable formats are Photoshop (.TIF) and Illustrator (.EPS).
2. Figures are generally published at 3 inches wide (1 column) by 4 inches high.
3. Increase resolution to 600 dpi and crop close to image when converting your images.
Now how do I get a figure converted to photoshop without having access to photoshop? Getting a "copy" of photoshop is almost never a problem. Getting the "right copy" is the challenging part of this problem! So I turned to my Law preaching, Fruit loving, Photoshop expert friend for help. She looked at my powerpoint figures and started ranting! "The colors are awful! The text is too close to the image! The labels are not symmetric! How could you get a Ph. D with this?" I lost my last hope of getting access to Photoshop!
Enough! I was going to find a way of getting super high resolution images in .tiff format without using photoshop or die trying! I tried Paint.net. It didn't let me resize the figures at the right resolution. I tried GIMP. It didn't let me import the text in the right font size and retain the resolution at the same time. But there was a way to make it work. I would have to delete ALL the text in ALL the figures and rewrite ALL of it again in GIMP. Ok! Let's call that Plan B! Basically the main problem with almost all the softwares was to get the right resolution of the image out of powerpoint without having to redo the image all over again.
After playing with every single free image software I knew of, I finally found a way of getting what I wanted. This method is so awesome that I should write another paper about it!
Step 1: Redo the figures so that they have the right width and height. (This is a one night job where all the text has to be moved around and everything has to fit inside the small space that is provided)
Step 2: Resize the powerpoint slide to the actual size of the figure
Step 3: Use cutepdf to print the resized slide at 1200 dpi.
Step 4: Use an image converter to convert pdf to tiff while retaining the resolution. This step retains the resolution but changes the size of the image and introduces borders.
Step 5: Transfer this to Picasa and crop the borders of the image and convert it to Filtered B&W.
Step 6: Open this image in Paint.net and resize the image to 3" by 4" and save the 600 dpi version as a .tif file!
Yoohoo! It worked! I am not a slave to photoshop!
