Indesign CC rendering Bitmap preview in low quality compared to CS6

[carloss62701757]

Hello,

We have being working with Indesign CS6 for a long time now. We work in the manga industry and recently we upgraded to CC. The thing is that manga images are all bitmap files. While working in CS6 the images look fine, but same files in CC look terrible.

Please find attached screen capture of same pages in both versions ID. Top one is CS6, bottom ones is CC 2018. Both Windows 10.

ID Prefereces are both set to High Quality Display and all quality settings for High Quality Display are set to the maximum.

For a long time, we have being resistant to change to CC because of this issue, but we work with lots of designer and we want to make use of the new features of recent versions of ID, but working with bitmap files is an every thing for us and it is really annoying to the eye.

This only happens with bitmap images, if we convert to grayscale, it looks good, but in professional manga industry, working with grayscale images is not an option for us.

Hope anyone can help us. Thanks a lot.

[Jef.Mod]

I think the main difference here is being on apple or windows, I'm on windows and also still have this problem, after 15 years working in manga I find it absolutely crazy that adobe is incapable of displaying a bitmap file correctly after the CS6. I've been in contact with them via twitter in 2022 I think about this problem, sent them files so they saw the problem and they said they were loonking into it, but I think they prefered adding AI in their products than actually help with a problem. (I'm sorry if I'm a bit angry at them, paying the amount I pay each month to get a very bad display quality for so many years now is really frustrating).

[rob day]

I think the main difference here is being on apple or windows, I'm on windows and also still have this problem,

It doesn’t seem to be strictly an OS problem, as I mentioned above, I can see the problem on an older Apple display—there’s no problem on my 2019 Retina, but there is on the 2005 Cinema display I use as a 2nd monitor.

[Jef.Mod]

All the other answers in this discussion mention the fact that this is mainly a windows problem, but maybe the display can also be at fault when it's older.
And this doesn't change the fact that CS6 works perfectly even on older displays, and CC does not, I tried both on all my computers since around 2015 and kept CS6 as long as I could because of this.

[rob day]

There was a significant change in the UI sometime after CC2014, which might explain why it’s a problem only on certain hardware—it might not be as easy to fix as you think. Would they have to sacrifice the modern UI in order to get the 1-bit previews to work on older hardware? I don’t have CC2015, but there was a big change with CC2018 vs CS6

[Jef.Mod]

Oh no I believe you it might not be an easy fix, it's just frustrating for us.

I'm not sure what you mean about older hardware? I don't need the preview to work on older hardware (my laptop is not even 2 years old and the problem is on the laptop screen and my primary separate display), just to work as well as it works on CS6, or as well as it works on photoshop which displays perfectly the bitmaps even on its latest versions.

[rob day]

This only happens with bitmap images, if we convert to grayscale, it looks good, but in professional manga industry, working with grayscale images is not an option for us.

Hi All, @carloss62701757 in the original post mentioned that converting to Grayscale fixes the problem, which is what I am seeing on my Cinema display.

It‘s worth noting that a conversion from Bitmap to Grayscale Mode does not introduce gray values in the image—the pixels remain either black or white, so there would be no affect on print output as long as there is no compression or downsampling allowed on the PDF Export.

[Jef.Mod]

I really appreciate your help and I thank you for it, I know this is an option and have already used this method at the beginning, but I personnaly would prefer Adobe trying to fix something that used to work than having to wait for a script to run for 200 page 2 times (bmp to gray then reverse, we are asked to keep the weight of the package on the lighter side) on every title that I work on...