Sharpening and resizing for a phonebook made in Indesign

[unknownp36856547]

Hello,

This is a workflow question to get the best quality photographs in a printed coffee table style book. I will be having a photobook printed by Book1One, they need a PDF of my book so I plan to use Indesign (and Photoshop for editing)  My pictures come off the camera at 300DPI but large-24inches- my frames will be from 2" min  to 10" max.

I have searched a while and can not get a clear answer , This will be my first Photo book made in IN Design.

In the past I have used Blurbs bookmaking software and have created the book then gone back and resized and sharpened each individual pictured replaced them with the updated version. This takes a lot of time!  But I am wiling to do that if its the best way to get the best quality.

I would love to save time and  have heard I do not need to resize my images before placing  in In design as the program will do that, but in that case how do I sharpen the ones that need sharpening, as I have read you should never sharpen images until they are at the correct size.  Would I need to do the same thing I did for Blurb, make the book with unedited photographs in indesign and then go back  to each picture edit/resize/sharpen and  replace them for a file that will be the exact same size as the frame box. (over 1000 images )

One last question. my pictures are jpegs,  should I first save them as photoshop images and if I do that would it be ok to edit them all reduce them to edited sharpened  8X10's and let Indesign do the rest?  Would that be too much of quality reduction  for the 3x5's to still look good?

Hopefully this question is clearly written I am experienced with photoshop but have never used In design, so any workflow suggestions would be appreciated,  I do edit the pictures a lot so I am thinking I should just pop  the jpegs into InDesign as is then redo each one - save as a pdf- and replace each individual picture with the properly sized one?

-hopefully thats not too hard....

[Mylenium]

You are overthinking this, quite frankly. If images need to be sharpened, then yes, doing so of course only makes sense if you do so at the intended final output size or else you are potentially applying scaling and lose that sharpness again. Everything else doesn't matter. ID can handle JPEGs just fine, so the file format bears little relevance. JPEGs even fully support embedded color profiles and CMYK mode, so there is literally no disadvantage here.

Mylenium

[KanikaS]

Moving to InDesign​

[rob day · Accepted solution]

and  have heard I do not need to resize my images before placing  in In design as the program will do that

When you scale an image, InDesign resizes the image and does not resample—the pixels are scaled and the result is a scaled output resolution, which is listed as Effective Resolution in the Links panel. If you place an image with an actual resolution of 300ppi and scale it by 50%, the pixels are half the size, or 600ppi.

But, when you export a PDF you have the option to reduce the Effective resolution from the Export panel's Compression tab—the default is to down sample any image over a threshold of 450ppi effective res to 300ppi.  A good argument can be made for not allowing that to happen because the downsample will remove pixels and soften the image somewhat. Whether Blurb's or Book1One's printing is high enough quality to warrant manually downsampling and sharpening each image would be debatable–I think you would need to run some tests and see for yourself.

One last question. my pictures are jpegs,  should I first save them as photoshop images

If you place JPEGs and export to PDF with compression, you will be double compressing the images, which isn't ideal. Converting your JPEGs to PSDs won't help with the double compression, because the compression artifacts get baked into the image when you save a JPEG. If you want to avoid the extra compression the better approach would be to shoot in RAW format and save the color corrected RAW images as PSDs for placing in the layout.