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Good quality halftone reproduction in The Huntsville Times requires an 85-line screen for black and white, and for spot color printing. A 100-line screen works best for process color work. Screens should be round dot and conform to standard screen angles. An output of approximately 1000 dots per inch, and not less than 600 dpi, is recommended. Negatives should be right reading/emulsion down (RRED) and should feature a dmin of 0.04 -- 0.07 and a dmax of 3.80 -- 4.50. Veloxes should feature a dmax of 1.70 or greater.

Halftone scans should accommodate a 30 to 35% midtone press gain, allowing for the spread of ink (dots) in the press reproduction process. Unless proper adjustments are made in the prepress stage, images will reproduce darker and flatter than the original. Black and white veloxes should appear slightly too sharp and washed out in the midtones in order to achieve a good result on the press.

This can best be accomplished using by using the "curves" menu and "unsharp mask" filters in Photoshop, or other image editing software. In the curves menu, a good rule of thumb would be to set the highlight dot at 2 or 3, the shadow dot between 90 and 95, and pull the weight in the midtones from a 50 percent dot to approximately 35 percent. This will give the image a "washed out" appearance. It's okay if highlight dots are dropped from non-detail whites.

To sharpen your image in Photoshop using the unsharp mask filter, good results can be achieved by setting the radius for 1.5, the threshold for 7, and sharpening in amounts of 50 (50,100,150, etc.). Images should be sharpened until outlines are visible in the negative or velox with a 10x loop.