Expert: Roy Wilhelm - 9/28/2010

Question
Hello!

I am student and I am doing a freelance design. I am having trouble with an image that I created in Illustrator. Whenever, I copy and paste to InDesign, the image looks a little different. The lines that aren't supposed to have a stroke, do. Or the colors are slightly off. Is there a way to lock an image in Illustrator, that way it will transfer properly?

Thanks in advance!
Missy

Answer
Hi Missy,

I have the answer for you!

Best practice is to always PLACE images in InDesign as opposed to PASTING images and graphics. Small, simple graphics are okay to paste. (little icons or simple shapes). But larger, more complex illustrations and photos should always be linked to the InDesign document by "placing" the file into the Indesign document.

1. Save your Illustrator file.
2. In InDesign, go to File>Place, and navigate to the file you want.
3. Hit Return or click the "Place" button.
4. Presto!

When you use the place command to pull images and graphics into an InDesign document, you're actually just pointing InDesign to the external file. The image or graphic doesn't actually physically exist in the InDesign document, but rather it is linked to the file.

To display the linked ("placed") image, InDesign will build a JPEG preview image. To increase the speed of the software as you work, InDesign will by default display a low-resolution version of your image. Sometimes this will result in unexpected issues, but be aware that many of the display issues are only due to the low-resolution nature of the display image. To see how the image actually looks, change your preview settings to high-resolution under View>Display Performance>High Quality Display. If you check "Allow Object-Level Display Settings, you can apply high-quality display settings to some objects and low-quality display settings to others.

Remember, these settings are only being applied to the on-screen DISPLAY of the images. It will not affect the print resolution or quality. As long as your original images are set to the proper resolution, they should print properly no matter what you set the display settings to.

Whether you apply low- or high-quality display settings to images will depend on how fast your computer is and how fast InDesign performs while you work. If you have a slower computer processor, you will discover that working in InDesign in high-quality display mode will always slow down the application. (The computer has to work much harder to render the high-res images).

Also, it is important that you avoid moving images, and renaming linked files and folders once you've placed files into InDesign. If you do, InDesign will lose track of the linked image and you will have to redirect the software to the file. (Which can be done via the Links palette).

I know this was a longer explanation that you expected, but I hope it helps!

Good luck!