Problem placing .psd

[HAWK]

Hi,
I am going crazy here...

I am pretty new to InDesign. I am trying to place a 300dpi CMYK .psd file into an InDesign document. It looks great in Photoshop, but as soon as I place it into ID it looks all pixelated and crappy.

I've tried .tiffs and .pdfs with no luck either, even though I know that native files should be better.

Does anyone have any idea what might be going on?

Thanks.

[TORCH511]

InDesign downsamples the DISPLAY of placed images by default. Let me make that clear, the DISPLAY, your images are fine. To save memory and improve performance it displays the placed images at a lower "resolution".

Go to View>Display Performance>High Quality Display and your images will appear as saved.

While turning the display performace to high quality is fine for a small document with a few placed images, for larger projects it can cause some serious performance slowdows. Example, I wrote an 80+ page tutorial on modeling, texturing and importing 3D objects for a video game. The tutorial was in 5 chapters of about 15 pages each, each chapter it's own InDesign file, combined in an InDesign book. Each individual chapter had anywhere from about 30 to 100 images, all 300dpi RGB (since this was not designed for print, but for PDF distrobution). I swithed from normal display for placing images, to Fast for editing and writing copy. Turning on High Quality Display would make doing just about anything too slow to work with, and that was with a fairly fast computer.

[HAWK]

You are a star Torch511.
Much appreciated.

[Lou Wrench]

Just one other thing… if you right click (if you have a two buttoned mouse, and who hasn't) or control-click (for the die-hards) you can switch the view reolution to high and back to whatever you want, just to check your file, without changing your complete document to a slooow monster
Lou

[eugenetyson]

Word to the wise. It's only a preview you get, not the actual image, it's just linked to the file, as mentioned above. If the image looks fine in photoshop and it says it's 300 dpi and it's cmyk, then don't let anyone tell you differently, not even inDesign.

On thing though, if you have an image that is 300 dpi and is say 50mm by 20 mm.

That is the size you can place it at. If you try to increase the size of the image by say 150% then you have lost some image data in the interpolation process, meaning that the pixels expand that leave holes in your image, these holes are filled by the interpolation process, basically sampling pixels around the image data and filling in these holes with the sample image data, resulting in a lower image quality.

Interpolation is explained better here: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-interpolation.htm

150% on 300 dpi eqauls an image of 150dpi quality when printed.

[DCurry]

150% on 300 dpi eqauls an image of 150dpi quality when printed.

Hmmm...my math says that it would equal 200ppi. A 200% scale would leave you with 150ppi.

[Lou Wrench]

Hi Eugene, I must querie your logic and math, or maybe we are looking at the same thing from different points of view, but if you enlarge a 300dpi (ppi actualy - pixels per inch) you do not lose data – it is just that the enlargement, in effect, makes the pixels bigger therefore less to the inch and 150% will make 300ppi into the equivalent of a 200ppi at 100%
Lou

[eugenetyson]

Yes my math is off there. Bad tired day yesterday. Basically I was trying to incorporate laymens terms into technical information. Surffice to say, if you blow up an image that is 300 dpi past 100% then it reduces the resolution of the image when printed/exported et al methods.

Of course 200% of 300 is 150 ... :D:D:D