[Scribus] quality images for press (digital camera? cheap/free online stock s? scan?)

[Gregory Pittman]

Tariq Rashid wrote:

>my local photography shop (run by photography and optics enthusiasts) insist
>that i don't need a digitial camera with more than 2MP - i don't believe
>them! surely, the higher the pixels you can capture the more you can crop
>and play with the image before it becomes unusable - cropping an already
>small image will leave you with even less pixels obviously).
>
>  
>
I have had an Olympus 2020Z for several years now, and very pleased with 
its performance.  Once you understand the settings on the camera, little 
if any image processing is necessary (if anything, maybe brightening up 
or improving contrast).  After a trip, I take pictures straight out of 
the camera, run scribalbum.py, add captions and other comments and 
print, that's it.  It has something like 2.3 megapixels, and I don't 
routinely save in the highest quality (which would be like tiff) -- 
usually save as jpeg.  Since it still does everything I need, I have no 
plans to replace it.  If I were buying new, I would get a 4-5 megapixel 
camera -- why? -- because I paid US$700 for my camera new, and now an 
equivalent Olympus 4-5 megapixel is about half that.  It's hard to find 
a 2-3 megapixel camera, unless you're talking about one of these cheapie 
shirt-pocket cameras.

My general recommendation to people over the years has been to try to 
pick a camera made by a "traditional" camera company, because the lens 
is important -- so go with Olympus, Canon, Nikon, etc., not Sony, not 
Kodak, not HP, and you don't have to go with a high-end SLR-like camera 
either.  "Digital zoom" is a useless feature, but real lens zoom is great.

>some have advised that i use an analogue camera and scan the developed
>photos?
>  
>
This just adds another step of aggravation.

>
>can anyone advise on any of this? is a 5MP camera enough? can anyone
>recommended one that has a good end-to-end system (lens and processor, not
>just CCD). 
>
>one option which is a bit crafty is to use low resolution images and then
>blow them up and apply various artistic filters to hide the fact that they
>were originally of low resolution - even tracing it to a vector format.
>  
>
This may require a LOT of tweaking, and probably at best would give you 
an "OK" result.  So, do you want people to say, "that's OK, I guess", or 
"Wow!"?  You sound like you're wanting to make this quick, so make the 
camera do most of the work.

TPFKAG