.jpg v. .tif for Press

[coppersnowboarder]

I am a free-lance writer and photographer for periodicals.
I have always submitted .jpg photo files after scanning at 600 dpi and never had any problems with quality. I always submitted WORD .doc files separately to my editors.

Now, I did lay-outs for a book using InDesign and inserting .jpg files for 250 graphic frames.
My printer publishing company informs me that I should have used .tif files, since .jpg is compressed format.
The original photo files were 2.2 gig on my computer.
The InDesign book file is only 50 meg.

Have I failed to save the photo files into the document?
Have I lost reproduction quality needed for the presses?

The photographs look fine when printed to my laser printer in draft form.

coppersnowboarder

 

[scr1bbler]

Your printer is correct. Jpegs are a "lossy" format, meaning that you will lose quality when saving in that format. Tif images are much more true to the original.

You needn't save your images to 600 dpi. All things being equal, the eye cannot distinguish, and most offset printers cannot print, anything denser than 300 dpi.

When sending your data to the printer, did you use InDesign Preflight / Package or did you create a press-ready PDF?

 

[jimoblak]

JPGs can be used in print. TIFFs are preferred but if you cannot see a visible issue with the JPG output, do not worry about it. Ask your printer for a halftone proof of a few of the photos to see if the quality is really an issue.

You should worry about the excessive 600 ppi. Ask your printer for their preferred ppi. That could save an awful lot of disk space right there.

 

[coppersnowboarder]

Text box frames:

I still do not know how to remove the boxes around some text and captions. Most of the frames are gone, but others persist.
I attempted to discover any layers of frames to delete.
No results. The frames look like the default basic frames and continue to print on my laser printer and appear in the data files.

PDF:

I finally found the solution to creating true PDF files for submitting to the printer or transferring files to others on CD.
The answer to creating PDF files is found in the InDesign 4.0.2 User Guide on page 386 and InDesign CS2 for Dummies on page 346.
My opinion is that the creation of PDF files should be given much higher priority in a user guide and more clearly identified within the index, since conversion of InDesign files into PDF files is essential to share the data files and incorporate the photograph files.

.JPG:

My photograph .jpg files total 1.3 GIG. Thankfully, this apparently is overkill, not underkill. The offset printer companies all insist that I need to scan at 600 dpi. My final PDF file is only 341 MEG, about 2 MEG per page of text and photographs. However, that is consistent with the files at 300 dpi in .jpg that I previously submitted with WORD .doc files to my newspaper without resolution problems.