Cover Feature Artwork Guidelines

Quantity and resolution

Please submit at least 15–20 strong, high-resolution photographs. A larger, well-edited selection is welcome, provided the images offer genuine variety.

Images should:

• be professionally photographed
• be at least 5000 pixels on the longest edge
• be supplied at their original or highest available resolution
• not be taken with a mobile phone
• not be artificially enlarged or upscaled before submission

Please do not crop images tightly. Wherever possible, send the full original frame and allow us to crop the photograph for the final layout.

Cover photography

The cover image needs to be strong, clean and immediately engaging.

Please allow sufficient space around the subject for the cover typography, including the featured Sifu’s name and supporting text. Avoid compositions in which the subject fills the entire frame or important elements sit too close to the edges.

The final cover image will be cropped to an almost square format, so the photograph needs enough surrounding space to accommodate this.

Please shoot several strong cover options so that we have a suitable selection to choose from when creating the final cover.

Opening spread

The opening two-page spread has specific compositional requirements.

We ideally need a landscape photograph with the subject positioned predominantly on the left-hand side of the frame. The right-hand side is used for the feature title, subtitle, introduction and opening question.

Please keep the centre fold in mind and avoid placing faces, hands, weapons or other important details directly across it.

A relatively clean background is strongly preferred. Busy backgrounds, buildings, trees, strong patterns or numerous competing colours can make it difficult to position text clearly and create an effective layout.

Variety

Please provide a good range of photographs rather than variations of essentially the same pose.

We are particularly interested in a mixture of:

• full-figure photographs
• medium and closer portraits
• relaxed and formal poses
• action or training images
• photographs with a training partner
• solo photographs
• photographs with the Wooden Dummy
• images with the Wing Chun weapons

Landscape orientation is especially important. Most of the feature is designed across full pages and double-page spreads, so landscape photographs give us considerably more flexibility than portrait images.

Please make landscape photography the priority while also including a smaller selection of portrait-orientation images.

Where possible, shoot slightly wider than you think is necessary. Extra space around the subject is far more useful to us than an image that has already been tightly cropped.

Lighting

Images should be well exposed, with clear detail in the subject.

Please avoid photographs that are deliberately very dark or heavily underexposed. Images generally reproduce darker in print than they appear on a backlit screen.

Avoid direct on-camera flash wherever possible, particularly if the rest of the shoot uses natural or controlled lighting. A consistent photographic style throughout the set is preferable.

Keep the processing natural

Please do not apply filters or effects that alter the appearance of the photographs. This includes creative filters, presets, artificial colour treatments, heavy colour grading, skin-smoothing effects or other processing that substantially changes the original image.

We prefer clean, natural-looking photography with a documentary approach rather than a stylised one.

Normal professional adjustments to exposure, white balance, colour, contrast and sharpness are perfectly acceptable, provided the photograph remains natural and faithful to the original scene.

Clothing and visual distractions

Clothing featuring your school, organisation or lineage logo is perfectly acceptable.

The main consideration is to avoid clothing, backgrounds or surroundings that are so visually busy that they compete with the subject. Very large unrelated logos, strong patterns, distracting signage and excessive background clutter can make otherwise strong photographs more difficult to use in an editorial layout.

Watermarks and added graphics

Please submit clean image files without watermarks, photographer logos, borders, text overlays or other added graphics.

Preferred file formats

RAW files are preferred whenever the photographer is comfortable supplying them. Common formats such as NEF, CR2, CR3 and ORF allow us the greatest flexibility when preparing images for print.

We understand that some photographers do not release RAW files. In that case, please provide the finished photographs as maximum-quality JPEGs at full resolution.

RGB files are perfectly suitable.

Please avoid supplying PNG files unless specifically requested. They offer no advantage for normal photographic submissions and generally result in unnecessarily large files.

If supplying edited JPEGs, please avoid processing the photographs too dark. Printed photographs usually reproduce somewhat darker than they appear on screen.

Please also avoid excessive JPEG compression or any other processing that reduces image quality.

File naming

Where practical, use simple, identifiable filenames rather than relying entirely on camera-generated file names.

This is particularly helpful when discussing preferred cover images or specific photographs for the opening spread and feature layout.

How to send the photographs

Please send the files using one of the following:

• WeTransfer ↗
• Dropbox ↗

Do not send the photographs as email attachments.

Photographer credit

Wing Chun Illustrated credits the photographer whenever photographs are published.

Please include the photographer’s full name exactly as they would like it to appear in print when submitting the files.