In part one, I discussed acquiring, editing and sizing images. Now it’s time to put together a figure for publication or display. Photoshop has good tools for doing this simple type of layout, where you basically have photographic images, some arrows and scale bars, and minimal text. Photoshop is not the best choice if your figure contains paragraphs of text, and especially if you’re printing a poster. The reason is that text is not handled separately, but is rendered as part of the bitmapped image. This means that the resolution of your document must be high, say 300 ppi on a letter size page. At lower resolutions, the photos might still look okay, but the text will appear jagged. In the case of a poster, the file size would be much too large to be practical for printing if the resolution were sufficiently high for good text quality. A page layout / drawing program such as Canvas is a better choice where you have a lot of text and a large document size. For now, however, let’s assume that you are making a figure for publication that takes up one page.

Layout and Guides
The first thing to do is create a new document in Photoshop. Let’s make it 8 x 10 inches, RGB color, at 300ppi. If rulers are not visible on the top and left sides, display them by going to View > Show Rulers. Next, you can pull out some guides. With the marquee tool selected, click and drag from the ruler, and a thin blue line will emerge. You can place as many of these guide lines as you need for your layout. Guides can be set so that placed images will “snap” to them or not. There is also a grid, which resembles graph paper, but I find the guides the easiest way to create a custom layout. Neither the guides nor the grid will be printed on the final output.

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