Problems with print quality of line drawings created in Photoshop

mikeeyre  wrote Many thanks for any help people are able to give. I've been learning as I go along, thinking that I knew what I needed to know; but I seem to have missed something important. Best wishes,

Hi Mike,

Since you are asking for help, I will offer this:

1. Use InDesign instead of Word for the layout. Place your Word file into InDesign, clear out the bad formatting that came from Word and format it in InDesign instead.
2. Illustrations should be done in Adobe Illustrator and kept in Illustrator format (.ai) when placed in InDesign
3. Images should be .psd (Photoshop) or .tiff but not .jpeg when placed in InDesign

~ Jane

mikeeyre  wrote so that I can insert them into the Word 2010 file that I'm using to typeset the book.

I guess you have to use the tools available to you, but Word 2010 would not be a lot of people's first choice.  For a start, it is a blooming nightmare using Word with images, but more importantly, I am not at all sure how it is going to handle printing those images — as you appear to have found out.  If you have Office, do you have Publisher?   I suspect it would be way better at printing, and it will definitely be better at laying out.

If we are not able to resolve your issue here, then a Word forum might be more help.

You aren't doing the typical work that Photoshop is used for. This is a vector versus raster thing which is well worth studying.

But here are some crucial points if you are determined to use Photoshop. Bear in mind the usual work is photos, and you have something with very different "edges".

1. For line art the 300 ppi recommendation is a bit low. Consider 600 ppi for quality. (You CANNOT adjust this later; you MUST do it before drawing and CANNOT fix existing work). This will make files that are really, really HUGE and this will cause you problems.

2. The P in JPEG stands for photograph. It messes with image quality in a way that works for photos, but nothing else. That is, the act of saving to JPEG is going to DAMAGE your work. NEVER use JPEG for text or line art. No, never! Consider TIFF or PNG.

I've been making the background invisible and making a copy of each illustration as a jpeg image so that I can insert them into the Word 2010 file that I'm using to typeset the book.

I am a Mac user and the idea to use word to create any print-data seems to indicate a lack of seriousness to me.

But I guess it’s been a long time since I had to process pdfs created in Word and its output features may have been improved since then, but as jpg does not support transparency what is the point of making the background invisible?

Could you post such a jpg?

The illustrations are line drawings created in Photoshop at 300 dpi.

Pixel images have »pixels per inch«, not »dots per inch«.

When I print the illustrations at home, the jpeg version has the extra speckles

Are the speckles similar to the damage in the right mage in the screenshot?

If so that’s jpg damage – using lossy compression has to have a price – and you should consider using tifs or psds instead of jpgs.

I gather that there is a difference between 'vector' drawings and another type, but don't understand the difference and don't know if this is relevant.

While a curve in a pixel image essentially consists of a number of (square) pixels a path in a vector image consists of points and the information of how the path has to curve between the points.

If the output size and resolution exceeds what’s available in the pixel image the repetition may become noticeable as »steps« whereas the formulae describing the vector curve can simply provide more points for any output-device-resolution (be that the screen, printer, plate-setter, …).