How to increase the resolution of the figures for publication

Question

[akang]

Dear All, I have figures generated from different programs and some of them generated in R. The resolution of the figures is low which makes it blurry when zoomed. Is there a tool other than photoshop that could be used here? I want to make figures and their labels sharp and clear. I'll appreciate any help!

[shenwei356]

You should focus the source of figures rather than post-processing. Try to set a high resolution when plotting with R and also check parameters of the other programs which may produce higher-resolution figures.

Answer 1

[longbow0]

You could output R plot in PDF format, which is a vector figure format and will not lose resolution.

pdf("output.pdf")
...
dev.off()

PDF format is accepted by many journals.

[natasha.sernova]

Unfortunately many journals require tiff-format.

Answer 2

[Guangchuang Yu]

you can save it directly to TIFF format and specific resolution by res parameter and also compression algorithm by compression parameter.

For example:

tiff("your_file.tiff", width=1000, height=1000, compression="lzw", res=300)
plot(...)
dev.off()

If you need to convert PDF to TIFF, you can use imageMagick.

Answer 3

[natasha.sernova]

Download Gimp, it's free.

http://www.gimp.org/

It helps to get rid of multiple layers in the pictures, to correct their size and resolution.

Look at its tutorials:

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

[Brian Bushnell]

I like Gimp! Much better than Photoshop, IMO.

[EagleEye]

I like Inkscape (vector tool of publication standards) more than anything. It is just simple and awesome. In my experience journals also prefer Inkscape as alternative to Adobe Illustrator for publication figures.

http://www.nature.com/sdata/publish/submission-guidelines

Answer 4

[akang]

Thanks everyone! That helped :-)