InDesign Share for review - Images are blurry

The compression in Share for Review is excessive, and enough to raise concerns from proofers who don't understand it's a low-res proof. Provide quality options, Adobe. 

Just adding my 2 cents worth: By now in our journey through all this amazing computer software and the desktop/web publishing revolution, we have long since gotten used to clear images. To serve up otherwise to a reviewer is counter-intuitive and would have been unacceptable in the mid 1990s. Share for review should send out clearer, less-compressed, at-least-screen-rez images in the collaborative workflow.

We have the same issue. Unusable feature until the auto image compression is tamed to reasonable levels. Embarrassing to review with this image quality. Had to go back to Acrobat Document Cloud Share where the image looks fine.

Just check what the Auto PDF generation is setting image compression at. It's probably set to LOW to save bandwidth on cloud servers. 

But to analyze the issue we need sample documents with the placed images.

Hm. Looked again into the details of the PDF export preset [Smallest File Size].

Transparency reduction is set to "Medium Resolution".

Perhaps this is also a factor if transparency is used on the page?

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Hi Srishti,

that Share For Review is doing low-res images only is one thing, but it seems that in one or more cases the result cannot be explained by that feature. A "totally blurry" image from a placed highres one ( 287 ppi effective ) should be not possible with downsampling to, I assume to 100ppi, JPEG, low quality. The numbers are just an assumption and taken from the pdf export preset named "[Smallest File Size]".

I think, there is yet another bug in the workflow.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Hi there, 

Sorry about the inconvience caused. This is an expected behavior, however, I will pass on your feedback to your Product team. Share for Review is to quickly share a design that is still a work-in-progress with the Reviewer(s) for quick feedback. Since the review opens in a browser for the reviewer, it has to load quickly even on slow networks, that’s why the image quality has been kept low deliberately so that the page loads quickly without long wait times. Using high-res views will slow down the loading of pages in the browser considerably, marring the experience.

Let us know if you have any further questions. We'd be happy to help.

Regards,

Srishti

Hi Andy,

could you compare the result in the browser with the result when you do export to PDF with option [Smallest File Size] ? Is there a difference?

Thanks,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

I can confirm this is my experience as well. Image with effective PPI = 287, embedded in the document, looks terribly compressed in the web-based review tool. 

Hi nicoleaskari,

can you show a screenshot of the result in the review of your browser and another one when the image is selected in the InDesign document with the Links panel open so that we can see the value of Effective Ppi?

Oh, and could you do an export to PDF with [Smallest File Size], open the PDF in Acrobat Pro and check if the image shows the same blurryness?

Thanks,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

Having the same issues, all links current. Even played with my view settings, etc. with no luck. Any updates here?