Actual/Effective PPI issue — InDesign isssue

[klpribula93]

Hi!

I'm having an issue with images in InDesign that's causing me a lot of confusion and fustration. I hope that the Adobe community can help me with this in case they have run into this issue before or if this is something new that I need to know about!

So, I am currently working on a banner for my college as a creative designer. I graduated from college in 2018 and got hired to work as a creative designer for a community college. Our sponsors provided us some .NEF/.CR2/.ARW raw images. All of the RAW photos look super clean and not gritty at all. I post process them in Lightroom and export them at 300PPI with a quality of 100% and then I import them into InDesign into the frame of the design that I'm working on. From there I doublecheck the effective and actual ppi using the link tab. The actual PPI tells me that the image is at 300PPI but the effective is either 72PPI or at least 130PPI. Knowing that the effective PPI should ideally be around 250-300 I'm confused as to why the effective PPI is set to 72-130PPI.

I experimented with a couple other photos that our sponsor provided me and they're all acting the same. I tried to 'up' the resolution using Photoshop in the Image —> Image size, but I don't really want to do that unless I really have to. But I experimented with photoshop doing that and it did help up the resolution but only by 100 'points'. For example; if the effective PPI was 72 and I changed the resolution from 300 to 400 in photoshop, The effective PPI in InDesign would say 104 PPI. I have experimented to see what would happen if I changed the PPI to 1,000 which is pretty extreme but InDesign says that it's at least 378 effective PPI.  I'm not sure if this issue has to do with the photos itself or if it's a user error or if this is something else. I double checked the display preference in InDesign and all of my settings were fine. I am a photographer myself and I work with RAW photos all the time and I'm just dumbfounded as to why this issue is happening now. Again, all of the photos look super clean, they're not grainy or pixelated at all and they're a pretty decent sized photo file (as they should be since they're RAW photos). If anybody can help me with this issue, that'll be much appreciated!