Hi,
Can you please help me with a screenshot quality problem ?
I would like to insert/link screen shots taken from a laptop into a .indd file. Everything goes ok as long as I don't resize the screenshot. Once I resize to a smaller size the quality of the screenshot in the exported PDF is not acceptable anymore. It doesn't have to do with the compression settings of the PDF file, because when the screenshot is in its actual size everything is readable and correctly printable even with a low or minimal quality of bitmap.
I guess I would need to have a screenshot as large as possible in its original size, so that when I reduce it it does not loose quality, but how...? If this is not the right way, could you please advise?
Cheers,
Manu
How are you resizing it?
Dave
I place it in the InDesign document and resize it using the resizing handles around the picture frame.
Hmm, that should work. To what are you printing? What setting do you have for sending graphics to the printer? All or Optimized Subsampling? Make sure you have All selected.
Dave
I'm then exporting to PDF format (I should keep the PDF file as small as possible because they are published to our extranet and should be easily downloadable), but I'm not exagerating in downsampling either (quality medium and Colour/grey/monochrome bitmaps downsampled to 150 DPI). The resulting PDF is poor on screen and printed.
The minute you start downsampling screen captures, you are in trouble if you also want quality.
Dave
You will probably have to resize an image like this in Photoshop. There is no "anti-aliasing" in a screenshot image. This means that edges of letters, icons and other items on the screen have very sharp edges...too sharp to hold up when resized within InDesign. Also, these images are 72 dpi by default.
I would suggest opening the screen shot in Photoshop. Make sure the color mode is set to RGB or CMYK, whichever space you are working in, and then resize it here. You can also change it to 300 dpi here as well, however do NOT let it upsample the number of pixels. The image will really fall apart if you do that. When you open the Image Resize dialog box in Photoshop, note the number of pixels in the Horizontal direction. Change the resolution to 300, and then put the SAME NUMBER back into the box for horizontal pixels. That way the image will not change size, but it becomes a 300 dpi image. Size the image to what you need and then save it. Place this newly saved image into ID and you'll be a happy camper.
Just switch off resampling in the Image Size dialog and change the dpi. However, there's no pressing need to do this because it is equivalent to what InDesign does when it resizes.
The issue you're suffering from is in your output stages. If you downsample a screen shot, it will deteriorate.
Dave
Rich, you've documented the pure way to do this. It works.
In my experience though, it's easier to just resize the screen shots
directly in ID. I've taken little dialog boxes and made them gigantic, just
to see what happens, and they look as perfect as they ever will. Downsizing
work equally well, and I have yet to see a demonstrable downside to my
'dirty' approach. :-)
But that's just my experience.
-John O