Imported files are really blurry and pixelated?

Report · Jan 03, 2011

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.

Report · Jan 03, 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.

Report · Jan 03, 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!

Report · Jan 03, 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."

Report · Jan 03, 2011

Now that I'm importing high quality PDFs, the document looks perfect, but the program is running super slow. Will this be an issue for the printer when he's opening it?

Report · Jan 03, 2011

Shouldn't be. What do you mean "super slow"? What's the OS and your system configuration?

Report · Jan 04, 2011

I'm running on Windows 7, 4GB RAM, 500GB memory, processor is Intel i5 at 2.66 MHz.

Basically, there are 50 pages in my ID file, all of which are imported PDFs. When I try to view the document at High Quality Display, each page takes 3-4 minutes to "read" (there's a loading status bar at the bottom that says "Reading filename"), which means every time I scroll down, I have to wait 3-4 minutes to even view the page or do anything at all. Is there such a thing as too high quality? Even so, it seems like my system should be able to handle it, considering I have nothing else running but Firefox.

Report · Jan 04, 2011

50 pages of hi res material is definitely going to slow things down. 3-4 minutes is a bit unusual. Try scaling back the view to typical.

Bob

Report · Jan 04, 2011

It works fine on typical display, but I was wondering why high quality display is so unusually slow. I guess I'm going to have to work with typical, then. Thanks!

Report · Jan 04, 2011

You can also try setting Live Screen Drawing to Delayed in the prefs, and turn of page thumbnails in the Pages panel. Turning off Live Preflight may also help.

Report · Jan 04, 2011

From what I've read, you may not have done any work in InDesign excepting to import the Photoshop pdf's to create one final document.

This forum could discuss at lengths end the merits of InDesign vs Photoshop for multilple page documents...let's not right now.

If your Photoshop PDF's were final page files, with nothing added in ID, you would have been better off combining the 50 page files in Acrobat; ID was a hurdle in this case.

Report · Jan 05, 2011

Lizbeth311 wrote:
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!

1. PSD will always ALWAYS output as RASTER. It's a conversion that happens on the fly and there's nothing InDesign nor Photoshop can do about it. The only way around it is to save the file as PDF.

2. Absolutely unnecessary step - same end result as placing them in InDesign. It may look better because the ai file will have a PDF for previewing in InDesign, which may show up slightly better than a low-res thumbnail that Indesign uses for previewing.

3. The PDF would be better - the text layers, vector masks and vector shapes created in Photoshop would retain their vectorness. Anything else, like smart objects, would be rasterised in the PDF to the native res of the file.

Daniel Flavin wrote:
From what I've read, you may not have done any work in InDesign excepting to import the Photoshop pdf's to create one final document.
This forum could discuss at lengths end the merits of InDesign vs Photoshop for multilple page documents...let's not right now.
If your Photoshop PDF's were final page files, with nothing added in ID, you would have been better off combining the 50 page files in Acrobat; ID was a hurdle in this case.

Absolutely 90% agree with this.

Technically it would have been more efficient to use InDesign to create the multipage layout. Photoshop PDFs can be quite large, especially when retaining layers for future editing, which can bloat the file. And a larger size file size takes longer to send via email, upload to FTPs etc. and longer to RIP.

By placing the PDFs in InDesign and outputting to PDF from there they may have significantly reduced the overall size of the PDF, which would be beneficial.

Report · Jan 03, 2011

P Spier wrote:
…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."

Apparently, changing one letter in the source code for Photoshop takes more than five years, since that’s at least how long Photoshop PDF has not been saved as PDP, as it obviously should.

Report · Jan 03, 2011

I'm not sure it's all that obvious. How many users save PDF from Photoshop with the intention of distribution as actual PDF to be viewed in Acrobat? I bet more than the number that need the convenience of using edit original without a hassle.