From the course: InDesign Secrets
255 Check resolution in a PDF - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
255 Check resolution in a PDF
- [Voiceover] As all designers know, it's critical to be able to tell what an image's resolution is. You need to use enough pixels in an image, like 250 or 300 per inch, in order to avoid pixelization or stair-stepping when you print it out, or sometimes even when seen on screen. Now, it is simple to figure out what an image's resolution is in InDesign. Right now we're looking in Acrobat at a PDF but let's quickly jump over to InDesign and look at the same page. You simply select an image, and then go to the Links panel, and you can see in this drop-down area what the resolution is. It started out at 300 pixels per inch, and because we've scaled it down, it's now 1452 pixels per inch. And when you export something to PDF from within InDesign, I'll go ahead and do that right here to the Desktop, and we'll call this G B white paper, you have the option here under Compression of what to do with the resolution. In this example it is going to downsample all the way down to 150 pixels per inch any image above that, because these are the last settings that I used. But I'm gonna cancel out of here, because the idea is that you do not have the original InDesign file. You're given a PDF. Where is there a panel in Acrobat that will tell you what the resolution of an image is? Do we have something like that, and indeed we do. You don't have to purchase a really expensive plugin to be able to get this kind of information from any PDF. So, if your boss gives you a legacy PDF that somebody created 10 years ago, and wants you to do something with it, or the original InDesign file got damaged, or whatever, you can still find out this information in a PDF. And you do that in any recent version of Acrobat Pro. I'm using Acrobat Pro DC right now, which is somewhat different from Acrobat 10 and 11, but in Acrobat 10 or 11, what you want to find are the tools called Print Production, and they would appear in this list here, and if not, there would be a little tiny triangle where you can click it and choose Print Production. You don't have that in DC, you have something much better. I'm actually getting to like DC a lot. I love this field called Search Tools. And what we're looking for is either Print Production tools, so I start typing Print and you can see it comes up with the category, but actually, in Print Production, which has a lot of tools, we want one specific tool called Output Preview. So if I start typing Output, it appears there. And within Output Preview we're going to be choosing a view called Object Inspector. So I can even start typing Object Inspector, and I love how Acrobat Pro knows that this command is inside all of these other places. So I can even type Inspector. I'm sort of showing off a little bit that I'm kind of happy with what the Acrobat team did here. Anyway, so we want the Output Preview dialogue box from Print Production. And here, whoa, it's a really crazy, busy dialogue box, but just put your eyeballs right here where it says Preview, and choose Object Inspector. With the Object Inspector, you can click on anything in the PDF and it will tell you a pile of information. CMYK and so on, but here's where we're looking, it is 300 by 300 pixels. That's fine with me. How about this guy? Oh, this guy is only 103. What about this little guy? Let me zoom in more so you can see him because it's actually kind of funny. The font, oh you meant typeface. (chuckling) That's our hipster designer. I click on it, and hipster designer is 204 pixels, so that's pretty good. Now you might be thinking, do I actually have to go through every single image here and find the problem children? No, there is a slightly more advanced feature in Acrobat. Close out of Output Preview, and one other tool within the Print Production family is called Preflight. So select Preflight, open it up, give it a second to load the profiles. Now, this also exists in earlier versions of Acrobat Pro. It's been around for a while. What you want to do is go to PDF Analysis, and right here, list color and grayscale images that aren't within 250 to 450. That's fine with me, you could edit the setting if you wanted to, but I'm just gonna leave it at that and click Analyze. It goes through the document and, bang, it is done. Here are the problem children, all of these images are not within that range. And I could click it to jump right to it so this background texture is weird, it's 614 by 133. And this image right here is 181, so on. You could make reports, you could have it create comments, I love this, insert Preflight results as comments. And then, let me close this out, and back up, and you can see that it puts this rectangle around everything that doesn't work. And there we go, there's another one up there. So, now that you have the images that are too low in resolution, well, actually, that's the end of the tip. But I have to add a little bonus, which is how to fix those things. Now, let's come right here to this guy. And I'll zoom in a bit so we can see him better. We want to be able to edit this image, so we're going to look for a different tool. I'm going to press Escape twice to get back to the document and then we get our search field again here, and we want to go to Edit. We want to edit the PDF, so choose Edit, and now, I can select this image, right click and choose Edit Using, and I'll want to use Adobe Photoshop. And it that it uses transparency, might be different, you always get that, don't worry about it. And here, we would change the image size, we would just ramp it up a bit. Let's make this 300 pixels per inch, and we might want to Bicubic Smoother, that sounds fine. And we'll click OK and then close the document. We're gonna save the changes because we're saving it right to our PDF. Go back to the PDF, and now this is actually a higher resolution. And if you want to check, we're gonna go back to the document, and we'll get back to the Object Inspector in Output Preview, and click on this guy and look at it in Object Inspector, and there he is, 300 pixels. Isn't that cool? Alright, so now you know how to find the resolution of images with our friend the Object Inspector, how to have Acrobat perform a quick scan throughout the entire document with Preflight, and how to fix the images in Photoshop. There you go.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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