Question on Framemaker 12 and Blurry Graphics

[gary.knighting]

Starting out with a very clean, crisp 45" wide graphic saved from a PDF file, I copied the image into Photoshop CC 2014, re-sized it to approx 5.5" and saved it as a Maximum Quality:12 JPG. The reduced file looks great in my other applications too. I then imported it into FrameMaker 12. The image displays in Frame extremely blurry and also prints from Frame blurry too.  (Note that it doesn't seem to matter if I select "By Reference" or "Copy into Document" as I get the same blurred mess.) While I can view a clean and very crisp image in Photoshop, or Acrobat 11, or any other software for that matter, the image is looking terrible in Frame. What am I missing here?

Thanks for your help!

[gary.knighting]

Thank you for that info. I calculated the correct dpi the next go around for this graphic. I suppose I just don't understand why other software displays a perfect image and Frame doesn't unless you allow Frame to re-size the original graphic. 80% of the time, I have to strip a graphic out of a PDF or Word source document to use in my Frame doc and most of the time, I don't have the original graphic to work with. It will look great in Word, great in Photoshop, yet Frame shows me a blurry mess. Not sure how this project is going to turn out having these limitations. I'll have to re-read everyone's suggestions and try to come up with a better game plan because this is going to continue being a problem until I find a workable solution! Thanks again everyone.

Janet

[Mike Wickham]

Here's the correct way to resize your image in Photoshop:

1. Ctrl+Alt+I to open the Image Size dialog.

First, we are going to set the resolution:

2. Uncheck the Resample Image checkbox.

3. If the resolution is not already set where you want it, set the

Resolution dialog to desired pixels per inch. 300 ppi is standard for

documents that will be printed. 72 or 96 ppi is standard for

computer-only display, such as Web pages. (You may notice that, when you

change the resolution, Photoshop will do some image resizing of its own,

but it does it without throwing away pixels. Changing ppi merely

determines how closely the pixels crowd together when they display. A

1000-pixel-wide image at 300 ppi will be 3.33" wide. At 72 ppi, the same

1000-pixel-wide image will be 13.88" wide. )

Now, we are going to set image output size:

4. Check the Constrain Proportions checkbox.

5. Check the Resample Image checkbox.

6. Now you can set your desired new output dimensions in the Document

Size dialog. This is where you would enter your 5.5" size, or whatever

it was that you wanted.

7. Click OK. , but changing image size and resampling does alter the

number of pixels to fit in the desired space

8. SAVE THIS IMAGE TO A NEW FILE. You do not want to overwrite your

original. The new, reduced-size image is likely to have thrown away

pixels that you can never get back if you need them.

It is very important to set the desired resolution BEFORE you change the

image size! I'll bet that your image will be fine in FrameMaker, if you

use this procedure to resize it in Photoshop.

[David__D]

janet.day wrote:

the original was 3264 px x 2448 px,

A lot of replies on this thread over the weekend!

Janet, here's one thing to bear in mind when you say "but it looks fine on my screen in such-and-such a program...":

Your monitor screen probably has something like 1600 x 1200 pixels (in the olden days, it might even have been 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768 or...) and its resolution in Windows is usually something like 96 dpi.

So, as you can appreciate, there is no way you ever properly see all of your original 3264 x 2448 image on your screen! Your monitor doesn't have enough pixels.

So, each program (whether it be Word, Acrobat, Photoshop, whatever) has to do a quick re-sampling of the image on the fly to show it to you - basically not displaying most of the pixels: you are never seeing what the image *really* looks like.

Most of those programs are well designed to do this in a flattering way that still looks "nice".

FrameMaker, on the other hand, being essentially a hardcore desktop-publishing application from early 1990s, optimised for working with the primitive computers of the times, does not try to do anything flattering to the image on your screen, and instead will display it in a crude and brutal manner (because, back in the 1980s, computers didn't have the capacity to spare on do to anything flattering).

I hope that helps you understand why "the same" JPEG can look awful when previewed in Frame but looked nice in all those other programs:

you were never seeing the proper image on your screen, you were first seeing a beautified preview and then seeing a brutalised preview.

What FrameMaker *will* do (if you set the settings right...) is make sure its postscript print output (in modern terms, the PDF you make) will be nice.

[David__D]

... although, reading many of the above posts, it sounds like the resizing and dpi-setting you've done may actually have prevented Frame from making its PDF output look nice, as you've inadvertently thrown away most of your pixels!

The reason you didn't notice you were doing that is probably because Word, Photoshop, Acrobat etc were never showing you all those pixels in the first place.

[gary.knighting]

Error7103:

How does installing printer drivers work for all of the potential customers reading this documentation? There has to be a far simpler solution than asking all of our customers to download special printer drivers to view standard PDF files. I am concerned that choosing FrameMaker was a mistake when my graphics are not an issue when using other software to create my documentation.

Janet

[Arnis_Gubins]

Janet,

If the graphics was originally a jpg imported into Word, then by saving it as a jpg again from Photoshop you would have further degraded the image (jpg is lossy and throws away information). If you have the original Word documents, then simply make a copy of the document, rename the file extension to .zip and open the zip container. Within that Word document zip container, you will find a \Media folder that contains all of the original graphics files. Copy these out and use them in FM.

Note, you can use FM's frames to crop and scale the images (especially jpg's).

[gary.knighting]

Arnis:

Thanks for the reply. The graphic is ONLY terrible-looking and degraded in FrameMaker and its resulting output. The graphics is fine EVERYWHERE else. It doesn't make any sense to me that my graphic is the problem and not FrameMaker. How can I use the same graphic in a Word document and view it looking crisp and gorgeous, have it look great when I print it from Word, even save it as a PDF and it still looks fine, yet import it into FrameMaker and it all goes to heck in a handbasket and have the issue be with the graphic? Everyone is assuming the JPG is the problem, but it isn't a problem until it goes into FrameMaker. Thus my confusion!

Janet

[Arnis_Gubins]

Janet,

You said that you re-sized and cropped the image in Photoshop and then saved it as a jpg to import into FM. Therefore, this is not the same image that you've used elsewhere it has been altered.

You also haven't provided any details on the image, e.g. size in pixels nor the dpi that you've used in FM. This will affect how FM renders the image.

[gary.knighting]

Arnis:

I have re-sized the image only. I did not crop anything. I saved it and have used the new saved jpg in a variety of other applications. All is fine with them. The only software that dislikes the new JPG image is Frame.

Janet

[Bob_Niland]

> How does installing printer drivers work for all of the potential customers reading this documentation?

The preview problem I described earlier only exists for EPS and PDF imported images, and only exists for the FM document author, during edit or doing printing from FM itself. The final rendered PDF has the maximum quality image data for all users of the PDF, and printed to any PDL (Page Description Language) printer on Windows.

I might add that the downstream rendered PDF from FM doesn't have this thumbnail/preview display problem for consumers of your PDF because PDF readers, like Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) are doing the job that FM doesn't - interpreting PostScript data structures for screen and print. PDF is essentially device-independent PostScript. Imported EPS or PDF graphics are a single page of PostScript.