Printing High Quality Photographs

[Ghosthound@adobeforums.com]

In another forum for professional photographers, a discussion is being held about the use of InDesign and Acrobat to assemble photographic "albums" for clients. These albums are being printed on high-end inkjet printers and the photographers are using state of the art digital SLRS to capture their images. Most of them are printing straight from Photoshop.

In that discussion, the following post was made:

"InDesign renders a low resolution preview for screen use, but for printing
it always takes the original. If you import a pdf into PS, the whole file
gets rasterized again which may do harm to photos or not, I really don't
know, but which definitely won't enhance them. So I agree, if you want
to print a pdf in best quality, Acrobat is the only way. There is a reason
why pdfs are the file format of choice (sometimes as pdf-x, but that just
adds job options) when submitting ads, handouts etc. to professional printhouses."<




Several things about the post have me confused, but my real question is, if the photographs are laid out in ID and the output to a .PS file is done with the correct settings, will the results from Distiller provide the same quality image as when the same image is printed from Photoshop?

[Steve_Werner@adobeforums.com]

I think you're getting confused by the abbreviation "PS".

I the quote you cited, the PS refers to Photoshop. Photoshop would rasterize the PDF.

I think you mean PS referring to PostScript, as in creating a PostScript (.PS) file.

[jon_gallet@adobeforums.com]

I'm still a bit confused about this business of rasterising a pdf when the image is already raster based like a photo. If a raster based object like a photo is laid out in indesign, and made into a pdf then surely the image info is still a raster object? Does photoshop actually do anything to a photo when it is (re)'rasterising' it?

[Ghosthound@adobeforums.com]

Ahh. Thanks Steve, you are correct that I had photoshop confused with .PS (postscript).

Still, I would like to understand if using InDesign and exporting to .PS (postscript) then Distiller, then print from the resulting PDF will compromise the quality of the original photo.

[MarkATS@adobeforums.com]

then print from the resulting PDF will compromise the quality of the original
photo.




It depends on your joboptions used to Distill.

[Ghosthound@adobeforums.com]

It depends on your joboptions used to Distill.

So it IS possible to take that route (indesign to postcript to distiller to pdf) and maintain the same quality as a direct from photoshop print?

[MarkATS@adobeforums.com]

sure. I don't see why not. Printers do it all the time.