Indesign Blurry PDF

[kathdepew]

Hello.  I am trying to PDF my portfolio.  All the images are clear/crisp while viewing them in the program and then I go to PDF and all the images in the PDF are blurry.  I have tried multiple settings with no luck.  Thanks for your help!

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

What settings?

Images are downsampled/compressed according to the compression setting on Export.

Post a screen shot of examples, and what settings you used.

[kathdepew]

Brad - attached are screenshots of when I print in high quality and also when printing on smallest file size.  Both are blurry (the smallest file size is unreadable...).  I also attached a snip of the screen indesign showing the all the images are clear and the PPI of the bottom right image is acceptable. Thanks for your help.

[BobLevine]

What do you mean print? What is the effective PPI of those images?

[kathdepew]

By "print" i meant export.  I do not have acrobat at home on mac.  I have it at work and opened it there and it was still blurry.  I will try again tomorrow - I tried relinking the files today thinking that would help, but no luck.

Side note, the PDF files in the document come thru clear.  See new attachment

Images in screenshot:

Actual PPI: 350

Effective PPI: 5706

Actual PPI: 300

Effective PPI: 3127

Actual PPI: 96

Effective PPI: 912

[BobLevine]

BTW, stop using Preview for this....it's trash. Any viewing or printing of these PDFs should be done from Acrobat.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

You still haven't mentioned what setting you are using for PDF export.

Regardless, the issue I see is that since alot of your drawings are fine line art. I suggest you use a setting where your images are NOT downsampled in any way. Even if you use a high-res setting (like 300), your drawings will be still be downsampled, which will causes the fuzziness because of the anti-aliasing.

Either try settings as in my example below (left), or increase your resolution manually to something higher like 600 or even 1200 (right). This will help maintain the crispness in your line drawings. Unfortunately, this will be at the expense of having large PDFs because your photos will be stored "fatter" as well, and they will add significantly to the file size.

You will have to decide on a balance which works well for you.

 

[BobLevine]

Normally, I wouldn't bother but I think in this case, bring them into Photoshop and scale them to the right size there.

[Willi Adelberger]

Why are you using for the drawings JPGs? Use a vector format. (AI, PDF/X-4, if the CAD program only supports EPS, use that, even if that is an old format.)

Avoid JPG for drawings anyway, better is to use TIFF or PSD if no vector file is available. JPG is ok for images.

[Eugene Tyson]

I wrote an article some time ago

https://creativepro.com/high-res-image-look-low-res/