I’ve been using transparent PSD files from Photoshop since the release of InDesign 2.0. I still remember the first time I used one and experienced a feeling of wonderment I’d never felt before when laying out a page. I felt free from the rigors of faking backgrounds with full page TIF files or drawing clipping paths.
Like many of the other features of InDesign that have made our lives just a bit easier I came to take it for granted until the release of CS3. From early on I noticed horrible black halos around the edges of transparent PSD files on exported PDFs. It was very noticeable and was enough to concern me about how it would print. The good news is that for the most part it doesn’t except on lower end printers (hence the title of the post). I don’t recall seeing it print on a high res device but what to do about the on screen problem and the fact that your client may have a cheap ink jet and calls every time you send a PDF concerned about it?
First, let’s take a look the issue.
Below is a screenshot from InDesign CS3 with two identical files placed. On the left is a PSD file and on the right the same graphic saved as TIF. You would need to look very carefully but there’s some very fine artifacts around the edge of the PSD even when using high quality display settings. It’s not visible in the TIF file and the reason for showing you both will become very apparent as we move along.
If that was all there was to it, there wouldn’t be an issue. But take a look at what happens when that file is exported to PDF using InDesign’s predefined Press Quality setting:
Not a very pretty picture and certainly not something I would want a client seeing. I long ago swore off telling people “don’t worry, it won’t print like that” especially if the client’s “proofing” on a cheap ink jet that does show signs of the problem. The other issue is that not every PDF is destined for print. InDesign is being used more and more for interactive PDFs which are used for screen viewing only.
So, why is this happening? It seems that Acrobat is getting very carried away with trying to smooth the edges of those PSD files. A quick visit to Acrobat’s page display preference panel and you’ll see that in the rendering section, smoothing of images and line art are turned on by default.
Let’s see what happens when we disable smooth images.
It’s certainly a vast improvement but as I said earlier, that view is enabled by default and there’s nothing short of walking your clients through disabling it, that you can do about other computers.
What should you do? Possible workarounds are exporting PDFs where the transparency is flattened such as PDF X/1-a or printing to Adobe PDF which will always yield flattened artwork.
However, both of those choices can introduce stitching artifacts so you’ve just jumped from the frying pan into the fire. My solution is to just using TIF files for now (which is why I showed both versions in this excercise). For most purposes that’s fine. If you use layer comps or layer visibility overrides those features won’t be available with TIF so flattening my be a better alternative. Of course there’s always the old standby: “Don’t worry…it won’t print like that” combined with crossed fingers.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on July 4, 2008
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