: Creating a book for print I am creating a book in InDesign for the first time. It's a children's book that will feature scanned actual photos that I've touched up in Photoshop and am dropping

@Jessie844

I'm only comenting about the images.


will feature scanned actual photos that I've touched up in Photoshop


1) Scanned. That means you have the original in paper or film? Use a high dinamic range scanner and scan at the resolution you will need.

12x18 so you need a file 3600x5400 px.

That meant you needed to scan the 8x10 photos at 540 ppi. The minimum you needed is 400 ppi.

That is the most important step. From there the images will be at the right resolution all the way.

2) Color. There are 2 points here. Your monitor calibrated and your color workflow and profiles defined.

3) No need to do vector at all. If thoose are photos, and adjusted in photoshop, vectorizing them will change the look completley, it is a totally diferent ilustration technique and style.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Angie364

AndrewH answered it clearly and with good details. However, I would like to add few things to follow.


Embed your PSD files


Embedding help you maintain quality of your imported documents, and you can just work on that PSD file and relink & Embed for any updates/changes you made.


Work in High Res canvas for raster based image


This helps you maintain quality even when you need to resize the Indesign documents.


Dont Downsample Image while exporting


Yet another feature of Indesign, where we can choose to downsample or keep the original file for print based documents.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Dunderdale640

The appearance of photos and anything linked is NOT displayed at the full quality that you designed them at. To run faster, InDesign by default will show the photos as "Typical Display" settings.

Change the quality for a single image:

Right click on the frame -> Display Performance -> (pick quality level)

Change the quality for all images:

View -> Display Performance -> (pick quality level)




I've saved these as PDFs. Is there a trick to this I am missing?


Make sure you have converted the images to CMYK color space.


Should they be made into a vector image?


Depends on how you want the art to look. If you're scanning an actual photo, then the graphics will be an image and not a vector.

Vote Up Vote Down