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Lab Handbook |
Postscript file to TIFF image conversion
What do you do if you have an old Macintosh graphing program that can't export to modern file formats for importing into Word or PowerPoint? Print the graph to postscript and then convert it to a TIFF. That's how.
| Open your graph or any other file in your old Macintosh program.
From the File menu, choose Print.
Switch the printer to Save As Postscript.
If Save As Postscript is not available, please see the guide to creating a Save As Postscript printer.
Click the Save button and save your file in a location where you will be able to find it and tag the name with a .ps extension. |
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Drag the .ps file on top of the Photoshop application icon to open the postscript file. If Photoshop is open, choose Open from the File menu, locate the file, and click Open.
First, set the resolution to 300 pixels/per inch in the window that appears and check both boxes at the bottom of the window. Then choose one of the following examples.
If you will be importing into a two-column Microsoft Word document, use this example.
If the page setup of the image is set to landscape, set the height to 3 inches.
If you want a full-page image, set the size to 6 inches rather than 3.
The larger this number, the more you will need to reduce the size of the image in Word and the greater chance that Word will downsample the image which will make it blurry when you print the document. |
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| If you will be importing an image into PowerPoint, use this example.
Notice that the units are switched to pixels, not inches.
If the page setup of the image is set to landscape, set the height to 1000 pixels. |
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Click OK.
You may be informed that the file contains fonts that are not installed on your computer. Ignore this message and click Continue but look out for any any text, symbols or spacing that may have been altered in this process. They should be repaired.
Before you save the image as a TIFF, you will need to flatten the image to smash the floating layer down to the background which is currently transparent as indicated by the gray and white checkerboard pattern.
Choose Flatten Image from the Layer menu. |
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| If the image is rotated, choose the appropriate rotation direction from the Rotate Canvas item in the Image menu. In this case, we determined that the image needed to be rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise.
You may need to crop the image to get rid of extra white space surrounding the actual image. Use one of the two crop methods:
Crop with marquee
Drag a box around the image. You can fine-tune the centering with the arrow keys, but if too much or too little is selected, you must start over and draw another box around the image.
Crop with crop tool
Drag a box around the image and fine tune the selection by moving any of the handles. Then double-click inside the selection or press Return to crop the image. |
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| Finally, you can save your image as a TIFF to be imported into any program of your choice.
Choose Save As... from the File menu. |
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| Make sure the file format is set to TIFF before saving your file.
It is recommended that all checkboxes be turned off in the bottom section of the window as shown. |
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| Finally, for consistency, please save the TIFF images as IBM PC with LZW compression.
As with all images, they should be resized only with the corner handles. Never use the edge handles as they will only scale the X or Y axis, resulting in distorted images. |
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