Trying to export an image at 300x300px without it being pixelated.

Question

Hi there,

I'm making a image / graphic for a clients email newsletter - they require the image to be 300x300px so I've set it up to this and exported at the requested 72dpi, however they've come back saying the image is pixelated in their email.

I then upped the resolution on the export to 300dpi, which fixed the pixelation but made the image size 1250x1250px instead of the required 300x300px. I've brought the image into photoshop to decrease the size back to 300x300px, but then the image becomes pixelated again.

To me, 300x300px is a small image size so is pixelated regardless and only becomes unpixelated when the dimensions are increased, but my client is adamant this shouldn't happen and we should be able to get a non-pixelated image at 300x300px regardless of the resolution. I don't know if I'm just being stupid but this is a frequent issue we have and I can never find a way around it. Help please!

The original image placed into the one I'm making is high-res too by the way.

Thanks 🙂

Scott Falkner · Answer

Pixels are a weird unit and they are not available as a unit in InDesign. I know you can select Pixels as the size of your document and use something called pixels in the ruler, but those are not pixels, they are points, or 1/72 inch. Pixels have no physical size, but InDesign files always have a physical size, unlike pixels.

If you create a 300 pixel by 300 pixel image in Photos ho then export it as a JPEG at 300 pixels per inch you should expect a 300 pixel by 300 pixel image that in one inch square. That is not what you will get. Because InDesign treats a pixel as 1/72 of an inch you will get 4.167 inch square image at 300 pixels per inch. If you measure that image in pixels it will be 1250 pixels square, not 300 pixels square.

This might not relate to the low resolution your file. That might just be that 300 pixels is not all that big so it appears pixelated because, well, it is, and there is no way out of it. But it is useful to know that InDesign is not suited to creating images that are meant to be saved in a raster format. Photoshop is much better for this job. Illustrator is a little better for this job.

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