Your photos suck - a rant

I just realized I failed to post this morning.

I make medical textbooks. By this I mean that people give me pictures and text and I make it into something that looks like a book.

Once upon a time people would give me actual photos, or at least slides. I'd scan in said pictures and put them in the book. Then everyone and their autistic gerbil got digital cameras. Not high quality cameras. Oh, no. No, these cameras fit in your pocket or come included as part of your telephone. They then send me these pictures and want to use them to illustrate some point or other. But you know what? This is a professional medical textbook. We win awards for our books. These are to be used not just for doctors in the U.S. Army, but often foreign militarys want to reprint or translate our books. That picture from your little POS camera doesn't look good in print. On screen, sure, but not in print. Five inches wide at screen resolutions looks like it was built from Legos when printed on paper.

Then there's those people whose cameras take large enough pictures, but save them as low quality jpegs before e-mailing them to us. They're trying to make the files smaller, I understand, but the compression artifacts made sure that your landscape now looks like it was drawn with crayons and the picture of that fasciotomy you performed in Iraq is hard to distinguish from an ad for a burger and fries. This could be someone gutted in Vietnam, a botched hangnail next door, or anything, really. We can't use this.

And what really sets me off? What happened today? Someone got pictures taken of them in some desert-like war zone which were printed off on an inkjet printer so the photo is now a collection of colorful, horizontal stripes. Not a nice photo printer. An inkjet. They then scanned these colorful stripes and sent them to me for publishing. Most are half the size I can use even if they were good. At least they were saved as high quality jpegs. They're replacing a couple of other pictures with identical origins which were saved as low quality.

What I can do with pictures scanned from magazines, newspapers, or other printouts is blur them. Apply a 1 pixel Gaussian blur over the image and those dots, moire patterns, and stripes meld into a photo that looks much better, but is slightly out of focus.

See this camera? MY camera? I blew several hundred dollars on it so I can run around the area and take pictures just for use in these books. When I can I'll reshoot what your camera screwed up. But I can't pop out to Iraq. People get irate if you ask them if you can cut them open so you can see their intestine scar. I can't send better lighting or a tripod back in time so to compensate for what appears to be an advanced case of Parkinsons.

I guess what I'm saying is "STOP FUCKING UP YOUR PICTURES!" If you want something that fits in your pocket then get something that uses film. I can work with film.

And the next one of you who embeds your images in Word or Powerpoint and then sends me the .doc or .ppt file gets punched in the neck.