Output Methods

"The time has come," the Walrus paraphrased, "to speak of many things. Of zeros and ones, pixels and fun, and lastly, imaging." Though Lewis Carroll and his oysters never had to contend with such ephemeral things as pixels, we do. And, as you're probably aware, a pixel's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: it doesn't really exist, except as electrical current in RAM or as magnetic force on disk. However, sooner or later, we all have to capture those wily devils in a more permanent form, such as paper or film. (We'll discuss multimedia and the Web in the next chapter.)

In the grand tradition of verbing nouns, the term used to include printing, exposing, displaying, or any other process of turning digital images into analog, static ones is imaging. The rest of this chapter is dedicated to issues specific to imaging your images, whether from Photoshop or another program, such as Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, we should cover a little background first: the distinction between contone and halftone output.