placed images appear pixelated

[matanb811]

hi,

i'm trying to create a layout for a comic book with indesign.

the images i use are from 300 PPI images. when i place them

in indesign they appear pixelated. i changed the display to high

quality, and the effective ppi of the images sais 300. what

else can be causing this?

[Peter Spier · Accepted solution]

You are still viewing a downsampled preview. If ID displayed every image on a page as it appears in Photoshop the program would never run. How do they print?

[matanb811]

youre right, it prints fine. thank you.

[skyrunvacations]

yet many programs do...

without checking the resolution or viewing the source image or printing it out, how do you know if the image is actually pixelated?  seems a little odd for a high-end program like this to not at least give the user the option to view the images as close to print as the display would allow.

[Peter Spier]

skyrunvacations wrote:

yet many programs do...

without checking the resolution or viewing the source image or printing it out, how do you know if the image is actually pixelated?  seems a little odd for a high-end program like this to not at least give the user the option to view the images as close to print as the display would allow.

Which programs would that be? ID does allow you to use a high-quality preview, but keep in mind that you can produce a page that is extremely large and might contain dozens, perhaps hundreds, of high resolution images. If it were storing all of that pixel data in the files they would be both too large to store on may machines, and would require more memeory that is availble to display. You really don't want to wait 10 minutes between keystrokes, right?

[Romanlavoywood]

Is there a quick way to just double check a single image in ID to make sure there are no quality problems with it? I get what you are saying about the massive size of a ID file bogging down your entire system, but I would think that Adobe would have some simple, light and easy way just to preview a image without bogging down your system.

The way I have been doing it lately is just saving it as a pdf and viewing it that way. The images that I was concerned about being pixelated were actually not pixelated, but another image was pixelated though.

If anything comes to mind I would love to know,

Thanks

-Roman

[Peter Spier]

Select the image and check the Info panel or the link info to get the effective ppi value. There's no guarantee that a high value means the image is good -- someone could have upsampled a poor quality file -- but a low value would be a clue to a problem.

[Romanlavoywood]

Thanks Peter! This is helpful 🙂

[orbit23029509fhsm]

They print fine.

[Jazz Matharu]

hi,

I am a little late but, you can view the images in heigher quality too go to view-display proformence then Heigh Quality Display. it done.

[nabatk29944704]

Thanks!

[ASTONMARINA]

This was the best advice thank you. I don't know how all these other people are creating designs that they can't see? you shouldn't have to print or save a file to know how it's going to look that really is missing the point. Microsoft publisher copes just fine btw everyone - and is easier to use. 

[teesha86955276]

I had the same problem too! I had clicked on the icon for PasteBoard Preferences (the little icon on the lower-left, near the page number) and selected Presentation. That worked well too

[flexwrite]

Just came across this by accident: I use View/Overprint Preview (or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Y)

[st3lla]

it works for me! thank you so much!

[beatrizdiogo8]

Worked! Thanks

[Honmeg]

For me, I have four images, and only one of them is pixelated. Why is this?

[Migintosh]

Did you check the effective resolution as explained above?

[Bob Schroer]

I had the same issue, all the settings were right, but the previews were still low res/pixelated. A quit and restart of InDesign fixed it.