Manually adding crop marks with Photoshop VS Using InDesign and Illustrator

[Cole Slow]

I've been watching some tutorial videos of How to add crop marks with Photoshop since Photoshop has no specific function to it. I've watched and read 3 or 4 tutorials, and all of them saved the images as PDF after creating the crop marks. It makes me wonder why they aren't using InDesign and Illustrator for the job if they are going to export the images to PDF instead of maintaining JPEG format. But then I thought, maybe these's a reason? So, is there any quality loss or difference if I place a Photoshop file into InDesign and Illustrator and then exported to PDF? Is that why those people are adding crop marks manually in photoshop and exported to PDF? Please let me know. Thanks.

[Trevor.Dennis]

PDF is a prefered format to send to professional print shops.  Vector layers (like text and shapes) are maintained as such, with no loss of quality.

[Cole Slow]

Thanks but I was talking about placing a photoshop image file into Illustrator or InDesign for the purpose of creating crop marks. 

[D Fosse]

Place in InDesign is what I'd do. InDesign is always my preferred PDF creation tool, for anything.

[jane-e]

+1 with @D Fosse 

[Stephen_A_Marsh · Accepted solution]

If the settings for image compression/resampling are the same, the quality should be the same between Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign.

What is different is that the crop marks in Illustrator/InDesign use a special "registration" (all) colour, that will separate to as a solid colour in all separations when sent to a print process that creates/requires separations.

Without viewing the videos in question, is bleed being created?

[Cole Slow]

https://youtu.be/EVwZPb2qz9I

https://youtu.be/1BB_30T-u2M

The links above are the tutorial videos I've watched to learn about adding crop marks in Photoshop. They created the bleed first and then created the crop marks. Only the guy in the first video demonstrated a process of saving the image as PDF. While I was watching him going through the PDF options, I was wondering why he doesn't use InDesign if he was going to save it as PDF? Because my intention was to keep the image in RGB and JPEG format for best quality. I checked some other tutorials, and they all demonstrated the same process for creating crop marks in Photsoshop since it's just plain and simple, and then saved the images as PDF, so I thought maybe there's a specific reason to it? Anyway, if there's no loss, that's all good then. Thanks. 

What is different is that the crop marks in Illustrator/InDesign use a special "registration" (all) colour, that will separate to as a solid colour in all separations when sent to a print process that creates/requires separations.

My follow up question is, are there any quality differences between JPEG and PDF for printing a single image at professional print shops? 

[D Fosse]

So it's possible to make crop marks even if you don't have InDesign. That's good to know. But if you do have InDesign, just use that.

PDF is a container format. You can basically put anything in there. Saving directly to jpeg, or saving a PDF with a jpeg inside amounts to the same thing. Jpeg compression is always destructive, no matter what form it comes in. It's fine for most practical purposes, but if image quality is critical you should avoid jpeg altogether and use TIFF instead.

[Cole Slow]

Tiff can be a real good option if I could just hand the files in a memory stick to local print shops since the size of the files often gets enormous. However, when I use online print stores, the size of the files is very limited. Do you have ideal Tiff options for fullfilling the quality and reducing the size of files at the same time? 

[D Fosse]

As I said, jpeg is fine for most practical purposes, and this is such a practical purpose. Just use jpeg. Quality level 10 is normally a good compromise between file size and quality - you get a small file with no perceptible visual quality loss.

The main thing with jpeg is that you don't re-edit and resave. If you need to do that, go back and make a new jpeg.

If you crank the quality slider up to 12 the file size grows considerably. But keep in mind that "maximum quality" is not actually maximum quality. The jpeg compression is still at work and jpeg artifacts still appear, just to a slightly lesser degree.

[Cole Slow]

Yeah, back to square one