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• • June 11, 2013 at 6:45 am #33869
    Julia Thorne

    Member

    I’m currently typesetting a book, which has 200-odd black-and-white photos in it (set mostly three to a page).

    When I was placing them, I didn’t want to place them larger than 100% of their original size, so I just clicked the loaded cursor to place, then resized to get them on the page.

    All the photos are quite large – roughly 1500 x 2000 pixels, and of a good dpi, and are scanned from original film photographs.

    Whilst many of them placed fine – they were huge on the page and I had to reduce them in size to fit, a bunch of them placed at only about an inch square (despite them having the same pixel dimensions and resolution as the ones that placed large on the page). I’ve had to scale them up, and they look fine when using high-quality display mode (though they are quite pixelated at typical display), and they look fine on the exported pdf (which I scaled up to 200%, and they still look fine).

    Will the pictures be ok when the book goes to the printers? (I don’t want the printers coming back to me and telling me half the images are at too low-a resolution and then have to resize them!) I don’t really understand why there was the discrepancy in the size at which they placed. Is there a way to check if the images are no bigger than 100% of their original size? (I know there is a preflight option to check for images that are not at their original proportions, but that’s not what I need). Oh yes, and am I right in assuming that just clicking the loaded cursor should place an image at 100% of its original size?

  • June 15, 2013 at 9:14 pm #33916
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    In general, you want the images to be at least 300 ppi, which you can text using the info panel. When you add an image to a document using a loaded cursor and just click, it gets added to the document at it’s native ppi, which for scanned images, sometimes the default setting is higher than 300, so the image would import smaller than you might intend. use the info panel to check the native ppi and the working ppi. You can usually get away with ~270ppi. another thing you can do to solve this problem is to set the ppi in photoshop, edit>image size> change it to 300, with the <resample image> checkbox turned off.

  • June 17, 2013 at 2:52 am #33924
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    > I know there is a preflight option to check for images that are not at their original proportions, but that?s not what I need.

    Correct. “Proportions” don’t say anything about an image’s resolution.
    The option that you DO need is under “IMAGES and OBJECTS”, “Image Resolution”, then check all three of Colour, Grayscale, and 1-bit Image Minimum resolution and fill in your preferred values.

    > Oh yes, and am I right in assuming that just clicking the loaded cursor should place an image at 100% of its original size?

    Yes, usually that’s the case. But at times I have found InDesign mis-reading the resolution information inside images, and, for example, got something interpreted as “1 dpi”. So suddenly an image placed at “100%” was 20 square meters large — according to InDesign.

    If you are going to resize figures anyway, you might as well not click-and-place but click-drag-a-box instead, when placing a new image. After placing, you can always check the dpi in the Info panel and/or the scaling in the Control panel.

  • June 17, 2013 at 5:06 am #33925
    Julia Thorne

    Member

    Thanks guys, you’re most helpful! I’ll go and put your advice to practice :-)

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