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Excellent suggestions. I must admit if our creative team created these files in Illustrator this wouldn't be an problem right now (this is not to say there's anything wrong with 300ppi files). Apparently, this is an on again and off again issue with various projects. Although it's the first time I'm seeing it in person. I'll fill-in more info to clear up any misunderstanding here.

1) The possibility of prep house downsampling our files on output is likely but I can't get our production person to retrieve that info for me to confirm. The deeper issue appears to be the foreground image is being outputted at lower resolution than background image, which makes absolutely no sense and certainly can't be explained by downsampling alone.

2) This project is done in Quark 7 and everyone here probably know Quark and PDF don't mix. The files in question needs transparency but saving them to PDF always drops it when imported to Quark. We could import these files as PSD for transparency or what limited function Quark can support, but we didn't and couldn't at this point because we (designer) lost original vector background art files and only have photoshop layer versions (text do have anti-alias on)...and the kicker is these doesn't match flattened TIF files that were sent to prep house.

3) I too advised our staff to avoid setting type in Photoshop but old habits die hard, as lnog as raster files have proper resolutions, I accept them as good. Anti-alias on or not, is only part of the issue, surrounding graphics that were originally created in illustrator were rasterized in photoshop and is now printing below 300ppi resolution and as pixelated as text. By the way, when I unlink the images in question from layout and pull another printout...it looks only a little worst than the HRZ proofs we received. Interesting huh?

Right now, I think we are waiting to hear further info from prep house. I'm resorting on the idea of re-creating the files in Illustrator if we must to get the ball rolling again.

TBH, I feel prep house has done something wrong, and in this case, no idea what they are doing. They kicked files back requesting we fix/re-supply perfectly fine rasterized 300ppi images. We can't fix what is not broken!