Quark Xpress 5.0 on PC - unembed photos? 2

[geekysteve]

Hi,

We're working on a 120+ page catalog, using Quark Xpress 5.0 on a Windows XP Pro machine. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond our knowledge, Quark has decided to embed all of the photos.

We have been using the "place" method to insert photos (no copy/paste). The file is now over 3.0GB in size, and is causing frequent crashes and problems.

Any ideas as to why the photos are being embedded? It's driving us crazy and is causing a lot of headaches.

Thanks in advance,
Steve

 

[tad1952]

I must be missing something. I didn't know it was possible to embed photos in Quark and I've worked with it since it first came out. I am working in Quark 6 and can't find anywhere to embed photos in it either.

Is it possible the images have been saved at a high resolution & then reduced considerably when placed - overkill? But while this is a consideration, I don't see how it would create the file size you are getting. I have a 48 page magazine loaded with ads and images and the file is only 3mb.

A good test would be to create a copy of the document, delete all but 10 pages, go to thumbnails, drag the pages into a new document, and then check the file size of the 2 documents to see if there is a difference. Sometimes copying the pages will lose some of the problems attached to a file. If it seems to be smaller, keep dragging thumbnails across until you have the entire catalogue.

I have been able to diagnose some Quark problems by opening the file in InDesign and doing a Preflight. This will give you a diagnostic chart with font, image, colour problems.

 

[onewrite]

"We have been using the "place" method to insert photos (no copy/paste)."

You do mean that you are going to File - Get Picture to insert photos and not to Edit - Insert Object. You will see a difference in file size even if you are linking with the Insert Object.

 

[billdetty]

I'm guessing here, but if your photos are JPGs from a digital camera, open them in Photoshop, reset the pixel resolution from 72 ppi to 300 dpi (and MAKE SURE the "Resample Image" check box is NOT, repeat, NOT checked)and resave it as a TIFF--CMYK, of course, assuming your catalogue is print and not, say, PDF-only. (You can save this as an Action in Photoshop and batch-process your images so you don't have to edit them all individually.)

Once you've done this you'll have to re-place all your photos. Alas, you're also going to have to resize and recrop them.

Now, save the document under another name. You should see a very considerable reduction in the file size. (I just tried it now with a 1 page, 1 photo document and the size went down from 3.5 MB to 279 KB. YMMV, of course.)

There are other reasons you'd rather not have JPGs in your print workflow (it can cause problems when the file is ripped to the imagesetter), so it's good to do this anyway.


--
Bill Detty

"If you can't solve the problem, change the problem."

 

[geekysteve]

Wow!

Bill, your solution worked perfectly. While we had been saving our photoshop photos (from digital camera, RAW format, 300dpi) as TIF files, when we went through and resized the pics (manually) to 300dpi, without resampling the image, that made all the difference.

We tried a sample on 1 page, and went from 25 MB to 1.09MB. WOW!


To answer the other questions/suggestions: yes, we were using the File > Get method and moving the pages to another doc didn't seem to make much difference (24.3MB vs 25MB).

Thank you, everyone, for your suggestions and help. We'll be busy with the batch processing of the photos...

Thanks again!

 

[tad1952]

Bill
Good tip. I didn't think of jpgs since I never use them myself in a print job. I should have though, since I always have to open & resave supplied files as cmyk 300 dpi.

Also, if they are digital images, depending on the setting, they can be as large as 24 inches wide which is way too large for most catalogues.

If you are starting from scratch, it's a good idea to reduce the size of the image closer to the final print size with a resolution of 300 dpi.

If you are just relinking the files & don't want to have to reposition & rescale them, just change the resolution -

ie, if the images are being scaled down to 25 percent, then you only need a resolution of 75 for a final output of 300 dpi (300 divided by 4 = 75).

Scaled down 50 percent, resolution of original should be 150 (300 divided by 2 = 150).

If the final output is 300 dpi, anything more than that is excess garbage.