Imported files are really blurry and pixelated?

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
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.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

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.

L

Lizbeth311Author

Participant

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!

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

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.

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.

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