CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • April 6, 2015 at 4:07 am #74411
    Simon Forder

    Member

    Hi

    I am a complete novice to InDesign; one of my contacts exported their entire Adobe package onto Mac and had some PC licenses left over for CS6 which is what I am working off. I’m a historian and writer, not a designer, and am trying to get a concept together.

    I have taken a large number of photographs in .raw format and used photoshop to convert them to .jpg format. I am then “file>place”ing them into a rectangle in InDesign as part of an article, and then saving the article as a pdf. What is happening is that in the .indd file the resolution of the photograph is being lost, and some of the images end up being pixellated – even without applying any real zoom.

    I have changed the Display Performance to High Quality Display in InDesign as I have previously found this has caused some people to have display issues, and have tried using both the Rectangle Frame Tool and the Rectangle Tool to place the images in. The vertical and horizontal resolution of all the images seems to default to a notional 240dpi – yet the degree of pixellation in InDesign varies.

    When I save as a pdf I have used all the Adobe PDF Presets from “Smallest File Size” to “High Quality Print” and there is no difference to the quality of the images. The pdfs are intended for people to look at on mobiles, tablets and pcs, (not print) and it would be useful for people to be able to zoom in to the images as they act as illustrations. I’m sure that I must be doing something wrong somewhere but I am drawing a blank wherever I look. Thanks anyone who can give me idiot proof assistance :-)

    Simon

  • April 6, 2015 at 5:31 am #74412
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    When you look in Window > Links (the Links panel), do you see any red or yellow icons indicating missing or modified images?
    https://creativepro.com/whats-that-alert-or-question-mark-icon-in-indesign.php

  • April 6, 2015 at 8:46 am #74414
    Simon Forder

    Member

    Thanks David, I wasn’t aware of this window.

    Yes, some of the images have a red question mark next to them, but this doesn’t seem to correspond with the pixellated images. Some of those with red question marks indicating a “Missing” Status aren’t pixellated and some of those with no question marks are, as well as vice versa.

  • April 6, 2015 at 8:57 am #74415
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    It’s important to remember that InDesign does not, by default, embed images. It just links to them on disk. So the Links panel should be clear of alerts before you make PDFs, or else it will just use the low-resolution previews.

    If you take a low-resolution preview and scale it down, it may appear high-res even if it’s not linked to the original.

    98% of the time, when you make a PDF and it has too-low resolution for some of the images, it’s a linking problem.

  • April 6, 2015 at 9:00 am #74416
    Simon Forder

    Member

    Although… Having just repaired those missing links, it looks as if it has repaired some that weren’t showing up as “missing” so that appears have fixed the problem. A massive thanks very much!!!

• Author
  Posts