Black Lines and Squares on TIFF files on InDesign

[hannahydavies]

Every time I place a TIFF file onto my InDesign page, it appears with black lines or squares. I have tried so much and nothing works. JPEG and other files are fine to place but not TIFFs which isn't great when I need high quality images in my document. I have edited these images from CR2 files on photoshop, then saved them as TIFF files - layers flattened too. 

Any help please as this is for a UNI final project ://

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

TIFF often has issues, the more so as time goes by and apps modernize and the format does not.

Convert to another format that works better. As for quality, you should have no issues with JPEG of the same pixel dimensions and saved at a medium-high quality level. If you're seeing significant reduction in quality, you're doing something wrong with your image or export management.

A few more details about your project would help give more precise answers.

ETA: It may be that the files are simply too large. You don't need to cram extreme resolution into InDesign to get 300ppi, or even 600ppi export. I have the feeling you might be using these at native camera resolution, which these days is into values ridiculous for anything but giant art prints.

[hannahydavies]

It's a coffee table book so mainly images with some text that'll be printed out professionally. So image quality for printing must be extremely high

[Peter Spier]

What is the effective resolution shown in the links panel?
What happens if you re-save as .psd and relink to that?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay, but it's still possible they are much larger than needed, even for that output resolution. To Peter's questions, I'd add —

Have you set Display Performance to 'Typical Quality,' or done so for any of these images? If they screen-render properly at this lower display resolution, it might be an indication that you're simply maxing out system resources to maintain a high quality display.

And, is this only a screen issue, or do these artifacts export to PDF as well?

I'd work out optimal image resolution and if it's much higher than what you have, reduce the image sizes to that value and save/import them as PSD.

[hannahydavies]

Yes resolution is on typical quality and the TIFFs are fine in other locations, it's just InDesign that they show with the black lines/ halves

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

ID is a relatively old engine/core, much older than Illustrator and Photoshop, I believe. It's single-core and almost everything is multicore these days.

[Peter Spier]

If you are on Mac, try turning off GPU acceleration in the InDesign Prefs.

[hannahydavies]

This setting is already off in my settings!

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

This does sound like a GPU issue. Also: check that you haven't saved your TIFFs with a compression: e.g. LZW... this can cause an issue with ID trying to generate previews (especially with GPU). Also check the color depth... 16-bit images can be problematic as well, especially with LZW. (CR2 files tend to open as 16-bit)

[hannahydavies]

Hi, GPU is off, no compression on the TIFFs, and color depth is fine 😕

[leo.r]

just in case: what are your versions of InDesign and macOS?

[J E L]

Hi @hannahydavies, I've never had any problems placing TIF files, saved from either a camera raw file or PSD. If you can provide us with one or two of the TIF images, we can see how they display in InDesign on our end. The maximum size is 47 MB. If your image is larger than that, you can use Dropbox or similar and link to the file download.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Indeed. there is absolutely no issue with TIFF... it's still the preferred image format in the prepress world. I see no need to go to the extra work to export JPGs. There could just be a minor corruption in the file. Where are the images stored? if they are on a network server, try move one to your local drive and see if the issue persists.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well, yes, TIFF is fine, TIFF is wonderful, TIFF is probably the pro's baseline standard... but TIFFs have always been by far the bulkiest file format, and I've seen issues with sheer resource overrun iteratively over the years.

And as noted, cameras (either real ones or voice chat devices with a lens) have gone to ridiculous/insane native resolutions in recent years.

So —

• Art photos shot at these extreme resolutions;
• Processed through raw./CR2 to TIFFs intended for "art book" results;
• Placed in an ID doc in some not-trivial number;
• On what can be inferred to be a student-grade laptop or system, perhaps a few years old...

Leads me to bet my wooden nickel on sheer resource exhaustion, at the bottom of it all.

There has been no answer/response to some key questions on this above. But the generality of high-end prepress work using some prior generation (much smaller) TIFF files on muscular systems may not be relevant, here. And switching to a less processing intensive format, at reduced sizes optimized for the end result, and perhaps splitting the project into multiple files... is suggested as a solution.