Place images at print resolution by default

[DickWynne]

How, when placing a jpeg image in ID, do I ensure it places at print resolution? To be clear, if my image is say 1200px wide and my printer requires 300dpi at final size, I want it to appear 4" (~100mm) wide on screen, according to the scale in the app. Then I know the largest I can safely use it. (I know if I stretch it it gets resampled when outputting, but with a loss of sharpness I want to avoid, and I don't want to digitally sharpen my images.) Instead, ID appears to go for 72dpi. I have tried editing the image's own metadata to 300dpi, but it makes no difference. Is there a default I can set somewhere in ID? This is such a basic need, to my mind, that I surely must be missing something here -- but what? Thanks for any help!

[Derek Cross · Accepted solution]

You can establish the resolution of an image placed in InDesign by checking the Effective PPI in the Links panel (see screen grab below)– you can probably get away with as low as 200PPI for average printing.

By the way, the term is PPI (Pixels Per Inch) not DPI which is Dots Per Inch and that is used for a Desk-top Printer resolution. (Not to be confused with LPI – Lines per Inch, which is used for Half-tones in commercial litho printing.)

You can resize your images a bit in Photoshop and apply a little Unsharp Mask afterwards.

To esablish the dimentions of an image multiply the PPI by the required dimensions, for example a 6'' x 4" image at 300PPI would have a pixel dimension of 1800px x 1200px.

(Note for screen-based output, such as images for the web, the resolution is irrelevant.)

[JR Boulay]

This article explains why image resolution is an outdated concept inherited from 20th century paper photos and scanners: https://www.abracadabrapdf.net/?p=6451

(Paste the link in Google Translate)

[Sheena Kaul]

Hi there,

I am hoping that your issue has been resolved till now. If not, please feel free to update this thread else let us know if any of the suggestions shared above helped you or not.

Regards,

Sheena

[DickWynne]

Many thanks Derek