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Lizbeth311
Participant
January 3, 2011
Question

Imported files are really blurry and pixelated?

  • January 3, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 53964 views

Help! I'm freaking out a bit over here.

I designed several pages from a book and a magazine in Photoshop (text, images, graphics and all) and am now trying to import them into an InDesign document to send to the printer. I import them the proper way, by going through File > Import. I created everything at 300 ppi.

However, once they're in InDesign, everything is really pixelated! I changed the Display Performance to High and it gets a little better, but still pixelated. Is this just a quirk of InDesign? When the pages are printed, will they look unpixelated? If not, how do I fix this? I'm working on a deadline, so quick advice would be much appreciated.

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1 reply

Peter Spier
Community Expert
Peter SpierCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 3, 2011

How do they look in a PDF made from your file?

What's in the photoshop files? Text is going to look like crap if rasterized at 300 ppi. Vectors, too. The way to avoid that is to leave any text or vector content live in Photoshop and save as Photoshop PDF, then place that instead of .psd (which will rasterize the text and vectors, even if still live in the .psd).  Quality is going to suffer, too, if you scale up in ID.

Bottom line though, is that you are still looking at a preview image in ID, optimized for the zoom level, so it is likely not to look quite as good as the original.

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    Lizbeth311Author
    Participant
    January 3, 2011

    No, I'm not rasterizing anything. I save the PSD as is, with the text still live, and then place them in InDesign - I didn't know everything was rasterized anyways! The document looks a lot better when I import the PSDs into Illustrator, save as an .ai file, and then place them into InDesign. I've also made all the PSDs exactly to scale in Photoshop, so I don't scale anything up or down in ID.

    But the PDF trick works perfectly! Everything actually looks perfect now. Thanks so much!

    Peter Spier
    Community Expert
    Peter SpierCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    January 3, 2011

    Yeah, photoshop import in ID is a little deceiving. Import .psd and everything is rasterized by ID, save as PDF in Photoshop and import that instead and everything is preserved.

    Don't forget to preserve Photoshop editing capabilities, and if you change the file extnesion to .pdp instead of .pdf, ID will know to edit in Photoshop instead of Acrobat when you use "edit original."

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