How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Cropping and combining
How to prepare effective photographs
Preparing the tables and figures

Whatever the quality of your photographs, you want to have them published legibly. To some degree, you can control this process yourself.

If you are concerned that detail might be lost by excessive reduction, there are several ways you might avoid this. Seldom do you need the whole photograph, right out to all four edges. Therefore, crop the photograph to include only the important part. Figures 18.1 and 18.2 show photographs with and without cropping.

Composite images consisting of two or more photographs, or of photographs and other elements such as graphs, also can aid in conveying one’s message. If, for example, readers should compare photographs, consider this option. Do not, however, prepare composites merely to evade a journal’s limit on number of figures. Images should be combined only if substantive reason exists to do so. Advice on designing composite figures, as well as on many other aspects of using photographs and related images, appears in the extensively illustrated article “Creating Clear and Informative Image-Based Figures for Scientific Publications” (Jambor et al. 2021).