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• • October 1, 2012 at 11:56 pm #63273
    ErikaAUG

    Member

    When an image is placed in InDesign, it should be already set to required dimensions as the textbooks advise.

    However, sometimes it meeds to be tweaked a bit (enlarged or reduced) and
    my big question is how much enlargement or reducing is acceptable?
    Say, the pic is ready for print, dimensions 5x8in, 300dpi, CMYK. How much I can afford to enlarge or reduce it without visible damage of quality−5%, 10% or… ?

    Any competent advice about it is most appreciated!
    Thanks in advance!

  • October 2, 2012 at 12:41 am #63274
    Tim Hughes

    Member

    I have always worked of the premise that you shouldn't enlarge more than 20%. And I think that as long as you don't go any lower than 200 dpi you should be alright, check it though, run it out and check.

  • October 2, 2012 at 10:17 am #63275
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    It all comes down to quality and your tolerance for seeing jaggies. For a pixel image that will be printed, you generally want to have 1.4 or 1.5 times your halftone frequency. In other words, if your printer says you'll be printing at 150 lpi, then you're going to want your images to have an “effective resolution” of about 225 ppi.

    (Effective resolution means after scaling. The Links panel can show you your effective resolution.)

    So if you import a 300 ppi image, you can scale it up to 125% and still get 225 ppi. (pixels per inch… some people call this dpi or dots per inch)

    We wrote at great length about this in “Real World Scanning & Halftones” (you can probably still find the 3rd edition used somewhere!)

  • October 7, 2012 at 9:18 pm #63308
    ErikaAUG

    Member

    THANK YOU A LOT, GENTLEMEN!!!

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