Deterioriating Graphic Quality 1

[harooki2]

It appears that the longer I work on my document, the more the quality of the graphics therein deteriorates. Is that my imagination or a known phenomon that can be corrected?

 

[jimoblak]

It is your imagination.

Describe how the quality deteriorates.

 

[eugenetyson]

Well if you're talking about InDesign then it's not your imagination. Images that are placed in InDesign are only thumbnails created by InDesign as placeholders for the real image at print time. The thumbnails are only lo-resolution and shouldn't be taken as an accurate depiction of what the image is at all. If you open your image in Photoshop and the image is 300dpi CMYK, and you have it placed in InDesign at 100% then your image will be 300 dpi CMYK, if it looks sharp in Photoshop then it will look sharp when printed. If you have it at 150% then the quality is lowered and again at 200% it's lower again and so on.

You can change the Display Settings by, View>Display Performance.

If you're running low on memory then the images may appear more pixelated, but it's only a representation of what is going to be printed, not the actual image.

But on the other hand it could be the way you inserted them, written about here

http://www.indesignsecrets.com/copy-and-paste-vs-place.php

There was a post here before about it

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1255684&page=1

and it's written about here

http://creativebits.org/indesign_and_embedding_images

 

[harooki2]

Thank you for a very thorough explanation, eugenetyson. As a matter of fact, they look fine when exported to PDF.

 

[eugenetyson]

Now you have a rule of thumb, if you doubt the quality of the image, do a print ready pdf and see what it looks like. Glad I could help.