[OS X TeX] Preparation of illustrations for press

[Adam Fenn]

I'm using TeXshop via PDFTeX plus the graphicx package and eplain to 
produce a journal.

I would some advice on how best to prepare illustrations for press. I 
note that publishers such as Springer typically recommend minimum 
resolutions of  300, 600, 1200 dpi for
halftones, combination art and line drawings respectively.

So far I have a few full colour illustrations, approximately 10 x 15 
cm, scanned at 800 dpi and saved as pdfs in photoshop. This produces 
quite large image  files, around 24MB, and both TeXshop preview and 
Acrobat Reader take a long time todisplay these pages (I realise that I 
can use draft mode when working on the text).

Is this the best way to prepare illustrations for press? Should I save 
them in a format other than pdf? Is it normal for pdf files with lots 
of high resolution illustrations to be so slow to display or is this 
more an issue with the amount of memory on my computer?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Adam Fenn.