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• • September 7, 2017 at 3:20 am #97803
    Mattias Karlsson Sjöberg

    Member

    I’m trying to learn a bit here. And since I come from a photography background I’m not sure of best practices for sharpening in layout.

    InDesign have no sharpening algorithms. And I’m not sure what kind of scaling algorithm it uses. So the obvious workflow when adding photos to a book and magazine would be like this:

    * Work with a “over capacity ppi image” until layout is final
    * Reopen image in Photoshop and scale to 300ppi
    * Add sharpen to taste

    Is this actually done, or do most publications take a short cut? I’m not really interested in personal preferences now – i.e. wether or not you do it in your stuff. I’m interested in knowing if books / magazines that I read and consume daily actually do this?

    Or is there an automatic routine that bigger projects go through that add sharpening? Maybe to the final pdf?

    The next question is obviously why there’s no print sharpening to add in InDesign. But that is maybe a question for another time.

  • September 7, 2017 at 9:36 am #97828
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Mattias, you are asking a question I have asked Adobe for many years: Why can we not do sharpening/unsharp masking in InDesign?! It is the very natural place to do it. Unfortunately, InDesign cannot do this. But please go vote for this idea here: https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601021-adobe-indesign-feature-requests/suggestions/31280467-add-image-sharpening-before-output

    So yes, the inefficient method you suggest is what people usually do. There is a plug-in that can help, but probably only worth it when you have a lot of images.

  • September 7, 2017 at 9:45 am #97833
    Mattias Karlsson Sjöberg

    Member

    Thanks David. I will push for that.

    So you would say that most publications add sharpening by putting in work, or most publications just don’t bother?

  • September 11, 2017 at 7:38 am #97956
    Mike Wenzloff

    Member

    QXP can do sharpening now.

    My issue with sharpening in QXP or ID, or any other layout application for that matter, is one of how images are displayed. They are generally slightly softer to a lot more “blurry” than in PS or any other good image editor (I believe that Corel’s Photo Paint is the least soft image editor). I believe with QXP’s “new” rendering engine and its ability to zoom so far and retain a “quality” image, it is the worst layout application to do sharpening in, but ID even on high-quality is too soft in my opinion. While QXP’s effects such as sharpening are non-destructive, it adds another layer for the PDF review process.

    So when sharpening is done with a soft preview–and do remember that what ID is showing is a proxy image–then it is too easy to over sharpen. So if/when ID ever does get in-application sharpening, do review all PDFs containing images carefully to see if over sharpening has occurred. I would argue that one may be able to get a very good sense of what is enough or too much in-application sharpening…but if one has to add one more thing to the PDF review process, why bother doing sharpening in application?

    Mike’s unasked for 2 cents of thought…

  • September 11, 2017 at 9:01 am #97968
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Mike, I see this a bit differently than you: In my experience, InDesign and Photoshop show virtually the same data in virtually the same way. As long as High Quality Display is enabled in InDesign, it looks the same. (There have been times I’ve been zoomed into an image when I’ve lost track of which app I’m in!)

    Of course, InDesign’s GPU feature may change that a bit… there have been some display bugs. But that can be disabled if you need to.

    Remember that Photoshop is ALSO showing you a proxy-image at any zoom level other than 100%/Actual Size. I agree that it may be hard to get 100% size in InDesign (because the image has been scaled), but I believe the image-rendering quality in InDesign is plenty good enough to do sharpening for print (which is always a crapshoot anyway due to the vagaries of half toning) and on-screen output (which is also a crapshoot, due to the myriad of devices the document will be displayed on).

  • September 11, 2017 at 3:16 pm #97983
    Lala Lala

    Participant

    Mattias – I don’t know what method ID uses for on-screen presentation, but anyway we’re worried about print. When you export to PDF, the compression options will downsample any over-sampled image to the PPI of your choice, using the plain Bicubic method. So the advanced options from photoshop like “bicubic sharper” are not there.

    It does suck that there is no output sharpening option. I worked at a print shop and they routinely just settled for Bicubic downsizing, knowing the final images may not have a lot of microcontrast, but they would at least be detailed.

    I have seen magazines with seemingly 100% consistent sharpness throughout, and my guess is they DO have a workflow to do final sharpening at a given size. What the workflow is, I don’t know. ACR and Lightroom both offer a feature to export a batch of photos with changed sizes and output sharpening.

    So a semi-automatic routine might be something like this:

    -Create an indesign layout with lots of linked images from a working folder.
    -Open all your original pics (raw or otherwise) which exist in a different folder.
    -Mass output these with preferred shrink and sharpening settings, you could probably use one a one-size-fits-all setting for most of them,
    and maybe make an exception for the handful of full page images or whatever.
    -Have the output overwrite the linked indesign files. Indesign will prompt you to update you links. Do so.
    -Export to PDF. Since everything’s already sharpened and “close enough” to correct size, you can use the PDF bicubic method
    to shed excess PPI.

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