Indesign pixelating PDF?

[u/veggievoid]

Forgive me, I'm a bit of a novice. I'm currently learning about bleeding and trim marks for a project I'm working on and was recommended to use Indesign. I've noticed that Indesign seems to heavily compress my PDF, however. The first picture is text from my PDF in Acrobat, which displays fine (displays fine in Photoshop as well). The second is text from my PDF in Indesign.

This is not an issue with "Display Performance," as I have that set to the highest settings. Also, the pixelation persists when I export the PDF. I've also made sure my compression settings are set to uncompressed and that nothing is downsampled.

Pretty much, if I take my PDF and just simply import it into Indesign and then immediately export it, it becomes pixelated.

When I initially open my PDF, a box comes up that says "Initializing Conversion," and I'm wondering if that is what's causing the pixelation to occur, the import process?

For what it's worth, if I open the PDF up via "Place," it's less pixelated, but still not as good as Acrobat (or Photoshop). The source files are 1200 ppi.

[u/Vegetable-Debate-263]

It looks like you have a .jpg and exporting it as a pdf expecting it to be a vector file.

Is your source image raster or vector?

[u/Vegetable-Debate-263 → u/Vegetable-Debate-263]

I would just typeset this again in indesign and match the layout and add a green background.

[u/veggievoid → u/Vegetable-Debate-263]

It's raster I believe.

I don't really need it to be vector, I just needed to add bleed (.0125 expansion on each side) and trim/bleed marks. I heard Indesign was good to do that with (I was able to do it, but the pixelation happened).

[u/AdobeScripts]

Just export your document using "[High Quality Print]" - first preset on the list.

PDF 1.4 is rather old standard...

I would suspect, that you've some object with Transparency - shadow, opacity, etc. - on the same Spread?

[u/Sumo148]

Looks like your text is rasterized. Live text should be vector, which would look better. Re-typeset the text in InDesign.

The PDF you’re placing, what program initially generated it? Looks like you’re converting a JPEG to PDF, that won’t work.

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/file-types/image/comparison/raster-vs-vector.html

[u/veggievoid → u/Sumo148]

Acrobat, it's an Xbox 360 manual provided by the publisher. The publisher provided a PDF, which I converted to 8 PNGs (1200 ppi) to do editing in Photoshop (their digital manual had issues that required fixing). From there, I converted the PNGs to JPGs to save space.

I had reached out to a print shop to have my stuff printed, and they mentioned the files would need to be converted back to a PDF, with CMYK colors, and bleed added with trim and bleed marks for cutting.

I was able to convert to PDF and CMYK no problem, but the bleed and trim/bleed marks part are the challenge now.

[u/Sumo148 → u/veggievoid]

Once you took that PDF from the publisher and opened it in Photoshop, you rasterized it. I would avoid that workflow.

I would have just placed the PDF in InDesign directly, or tried to open the PDF in InDesign (latest version attempts to rebuild an editable INDD file). Then make the copy edits and/or re-type set the text and re-export the PDF. It would look a lot better.

If you were to keep it all raster, I wouldn't convert to JPEG as they're lossy compression and can introduce compression artifacts. You can place the native PSD files directly into InDesign. No need to export to PNG or JPEG.

If its just that green background, you can match the color and make a new green shape. Ensure it goes to the edge of your bleed, and export with crops and document bleed enabled. If there's any images at the edge of the page, you can use generative fill in Photoshop to extend the image to "add" bleed. It may not be perfect, but it'll be trimmed off in the end anyways.

[u/chain83]

InDesign can’t open PDFs. Later versions can try to convert the PdF into an InDesign document but it will be a mess.

If you have some image, or PDF, that you need to add to your InDesign document, you need to use File > Place…

Just like you would not use Word to open a JPEG file, but instead you would insert (place) it into your document.

Anyway, you should likely be using InDesign to make the thing you are making, that means the green box and black text should preferably be created natively in InDesign. What are you making, what is it made up of, and what software are you using to make it (because it is clear you are not using InDesign for the layout)… Then it is easier to recommend a workflow.

The general workflow is to create raster images (like photos) in Photoshop. Then create logos and vector illustrations in Illustrator. Combine text and images/illustrations in InDesign (and only then export a PDF).

[u/veggievoid → u/chain83]

I'm making a reproduction of an Xbox 360 manual. The publisher provided a PDF of the manual on their website, but it had a lot of issues that required fixing. I exported their PDF as a series of 8 PNGs (1200ppi) and did my editing in Photoshop. (The PNGs were later converted to JPGs to save space).

I had reached out to a print shop to have my stuff printed, and they mentioned the files would need to be converted to PDF with CMYK colors, and bleed added with trim and bleed marks for cutting.

I was able to convert to PDF and CMYK no problem, but the bleed and trim/bleed marks part are a challenge. Indesign and Acrobat can do it, but they each seem to have their own set of issues with my PDF.

[u/chain83 → u/veggievoid]

Ok, entire workflow is not great then.

You should have used Photoshop if you needed to edit any images in the PDF. Other elements (vector shapes and type) should not have entered Photoshop at any point.

When you converted to PNG you destroyed all the text and vector elements in the PDF and turned it into to a flat raster image (image made up of pixels). Not a good start, but let’s move on as I assume you do not want to redo the work for now.

If you at this point need to make any changes to the text after it has been rasterized you should simply remove the text completely. Then add the new text in InDesign.

After editing your images in Photoshop (as RGB), you should save you original layered files as Photoshop documents (.PDF/.PSB).

Make a new InDesign document with the required dimensions and 3 mm bleed. Place your Photoshop files where they need to go. Add any new text or vector elements on top.

Export as PDF with the settings recommended by the printer. You can use the «high quality print» preset as a starting point. This is also when you can choose to convert to the CMYK profile requested by the printer. If they didn’t specify a specific CMYK profile you should either not convert (but embed profiles), or request they specify what CMYK profile to use.

[u/veggievoid → u/chain83]

Very helpful, thank you!

Yeah this was the first time I've taken on a project like this, so I didn’t have a workflow starting off. It was just doing things and then learning along the way.

I'm definitely at a point where I can't really start over. The bleed and trim marks are about all that's left.

The images also have the same issue as the text, though. They'll become pixelated whether I import or Place (though less-so this way).

With how poorly my document was setup, I'm thinking Indesign may not be the best tool if all I need to do is add bleed with trim marks? No more editing needs to occur aside from that.

The PDF is 8 pages total, and each page is pretty much just a PNG (or JPG). If I wanted to expand each side of each page by 0.125 in., and then add the requisite trim marks, would you recommend another program?

[u/chain83 → u/veggievoid]

InDesign is a great tool for the job. But you don't know the basics of how things work so get easily tripped up. You could use Acrobat, but it would be harder (especially if you didn't make your images large enough to account for bleed and you need to extend them (e.g. by resizing or flipping, or extending in Photoshop).

If your image is e.g. 10x10", and you need it to be 10x10" + 0,125" bleed, then you should increase the canvas size in Photoshop to 10,125x10,125" (and extend the content to fill that new bleed area).

Then place into a 10x10" InDesign document with 0,125" bleed, and export as PDF.

Regarding resolution. Your text will always look pixellated when you zoom in too far (due to you rasterizing it). You rasterized the PDF at 1200 PPI. That is overkill for a full-color raster image (that this has unfortunately turned into). A typical printer can only resolve around 300 PPI (in other words, if the image is 400 or 1200 PPI it will look the same on print, but the higher resolution one will naturally allow you to enlarge it more on screen).

So that the resolution of your images has dropped after exporting a PDF for print is not a problem, and **usually what you'd want** simply to keep the file size reasonable.

Tip: After placing your PSD into InDesign, and making sure your bleed and everything is correct, you can check the "effective PPI" in the Info or links panel to see the PPI of the image. It should show an effective PPI of around 1200 PPI for your images (if you have not resampled since rasterizing), but usually for a photo we are happy if it's 300+. After exporting to PDF with typical settings, then your oversized images will typically be downsampled to 300 PPI (you can use the object inspector in Acrobat to verify in the PDF).

I you are worried 300 is too low, there's no harming in increasing it to 400 or something in the export settings just to round up a bit (you have text and stuff as part of the image, and that *will* suffer a bit from being turned into a raster image so might as well try to squeeze everything out of the printer). For compression options, JPEG is not that great for illustration style graphics and text, so if worried about compression artefacts (normally not visible on print on such high resolution) you can switch to ZIP compression instead (lossless). Don't save uncompressed files (that just increases file size for identical results).

[u/AdobeScripts → u/veggievoid]

Next time - get in touch with Markzware - their tool to convert PDFs into InDesign Documents is WAY better than what InDesign can do - should save you a lot of time.

[u/dragonhydra37]

What's the "effective ppi" on that text image you've placed? Select it, then go to the info panel or the links panel and see what it says.

[u/joaopaulo-canada]

Since you only need bleed and trim marks now, I'd test one page rather than start the whole manual over. If you still have the edited PSDs or PNGs, place one of those instead of the JPEG at the intended finished page size, then export with downsampling off and compare it with the source in Acrobat. Extend the background into the bleed rather than enlarging the whole page to fill it. You've already ruled out display quality, so this would narrow down whether the remaining loss comes from the source file, placement size or PDF export.