Adding picture to indesign drains quality!

[thelibertine]

I have a scanned black and white BMP file that looks great in the picture viewer, but as soon as I add it to indesign the quality seems to have dropped remakably... It's the same size... and even though I make the picture smaller, it still looks like crap... Why does this happen in indesign and what can I do to get the same great quality as in the picture viewer???

 

[apepp]

...display settings...

...view > display performance > high quality...

...note that this slows down indesign if working on a complex doc with lots of images...

...view > overprint preview, also invokes high quality display as too does the separation palette...

andrew

 

[eugenetyson]

InDesign only offers a preview of the image, for laying out the page, purpose.

If you want to check the quality of your image then andrew is correct.

You can also check the Window>Info panel to see what the image quality actually is.

It shows two things.

Actual PPI and Effective PPI

Actual PPI represents the resolution of the image at 100%

Effective PPI represents the resolution of the image at print.

Ideally you'd want to have Effective PPI of 300 for good prints.

You can have an image at actual ppi of 72. And if you scale it within InDesign to 24% the Effective PPI changes to 300 ppi, which is perfect for printing.

If you have an image that the Actual PPI is 300 dpi and you enlarge it in InDesign then the effective ppi is reduced, meaning that on output the image quality will be less than 300 ppi.

http://www.doozler.blogspot.com/