Expert: Ken Black - 2/12/2009

Question
Hello, I've received the proofs from our printers and one of the images looked
blurry/low resolution. I asked the contributor to send a higher resolution
photo, and she sent us the image at 300 DPI. Opening the image with
Preview/Photoshop shows a very clear image, but when I place it in InDesign
it looks blurry / jagged. The image is a JPEG, CMYK 8 color. Do you have any
idea why this photo's resolution seems to change upon placement?

Answer
Hi Reilly,

This can be caused by placing a 300 dpi image and scaling it to make it larger. The larger you scale an image the lower its effective resolution becomes. Anything scaled over 150% starts to lose its resolution exponentially and will begin to look pixelated or blurry/jagged.

For more indepth information on Resolution visit http://www.bestprintingonline.com/resolution.htm

If that is not the case...

Indesign also uses 3 different viewing types for display performance. The default is Typical display which shows low resolution previews.
Changing this to High Quality will give you a high resolution display.
There is also a Fast display that removes the image previews. These are available under the View Menu in Display Performance. As you will note there is also Object Level display checked on by default to allow only certain objects to display high quality or not. This can be changed by selecting an object and then selecting Display Performance under the Object Menu. Indesign does this to allow easier viewing on machines with slow graphic accelerators or lacking in memory.

Thanks,

Ken Black

www.bestprintingonline.com