I notice that pdfs, the imagery comes out soft. any way within making pdfs that they can be sharp? I don't think a setting like that exist. correct?
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White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I'm no expert on pdf's but there is a setting when saving for resolution settings. Maybe you saved it at 72 dpi?? Or are you saving the images being used in pdf's at the wrong resolution?
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
A PDF is really just a container structure: it will contain what you put in it. Whatever problem you're having pertains the particular way you're creating the PDF in the first place. For example, you can go into Photoshop, load a gargantuan—sharp—bitmap and save it as a PDF without any compression or rescaling and you'll wind up with… pretty much the exact same image data wrapped in a PDF file.
Now, there's another variable which is the tool you're using to render (i.e., view) the PDF file once it has been created. That tool could do all kinds of things you don't want it to do, including resampling the image data "for your convenience" or incorrectly interpreting the color profile. Furthermore, PDFs are page-oriented and rather obsessive about spatial dimensions, so it's easy to carelessly create a PDF that contains an image with an inappropriate dpi vis-a-vis the page, and that can lead to blurriness.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Martin,
thanks,
my designer is making pdf portfolios for me in In design. They are very blurry and out of focus. She has to compress them to make the viable to email. That said, even the less compressed versions look blurry as well. I'm opening them in Acrobat or Preview. any ideas?
__________________ MAC 10.4.12
CS4
Mac G5/ dual 1.8
CANON 5D
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Simple answer, if you're giving the designer images that are sharp, it's their job to figure out what's wrong. Sorry to be blunt.
EDIT: I just forgot - some programs will display images in pdf's as low rez. This is done to make viewing/editing faster rather than load the full file size. I can't remember which programs this applies to however it did take me awhile to figure this out and make the change in the settings. I seem to recall InDesign does this but it was many years ago when I encountered this.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Last edited by DougAxford; 04-22-2009 at 11:54 PM.
Doug,
I totally agree, and she is a killer designer, these techicalites are not her forte. I was thinking of giving her overly sharp, super sharpend files and seeing if that might solve it.
It's truly amazing to see my crisp razor sharp images reduced to mush. And these pdfs go out to real clients. I can send you some pdf's if you think you can solve it.
__________________ MAC 10.4.12
CS4
Mac G5/ dual 1.8
CANON 5D
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
As mentioned above, put full resolution images in, you will see sharp images in the PDF. There are indeed settings that determine the amount of compression images are subjected to.
Resolution is an issue a lot of folks don't fully understand. It's really pretty simple. If anyone in the chain of production of your work can't discuss pixels and dpi and image size with you (not to mention compression) without trouble, either 1) they need educating, or 2) you need different people.
I was doing the final electronic review for my astrophotography book with the printer, and they had hugely degraded the images they had put into the file. In a 2 page view on the screen (100ish dpi) it looked fine, but it certainly didn't have the resolution my original data carried. It had been reduced to 100 dpi in the proof by some moron who didn't know what he was doing... I ended up having to remake the PDF entirely for them. Not sure what value they added in the end; I should probably do self-printing for future books.
Before that the publisher couldn't deal with my full 300 dpi images for reviews either; they claimed their computers were too wimpy for the job. This was a professional publishing house, mind you!! And these are only 300 dpi, not 1200 or beyond!!!
It's amazing to me how many people don't grasp resolution and/or can't deal with real high resolution data. It's a wonder any good printings get made at all.
Finally, if people can't eMail you a PDF, have them upload it to somewhere like YouSendIt.com and email the link. It's utterly ridiculous in this day and age of high speed networking not to be able to pass around files of tens or even hundreds of megabytes.
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