image dpi detection in Acrobat Pro 9

[FocusMagPublisher]

For some reason, InDesgin CS4's "info" tool isn't giving me the info I need on the exact dpi of an image. My printer can only work with 300 dpi and above for my magazine and InDesign's preflight isn't picking it up on ANY setting (even if I set the minimum dpi to 1000 it won't pick it up). It's a PDF. Is there a way to tell, using Acrobat, what the dpi of the image is?

 

[leonardr]

For some reason, InDesgin CS4's "info" tool isn't giving me the info I need on the exact dpi of an image. My printer can only work with 300 dpi and above for my magazine and InDesign's preflight isn't picking it up on ANY setting (even if I set the minimum dpi to 1000 it won't pick it up). It's a PDF. Is there a way to tell, using Acrobat, what the dpi of the image is?

Sure!

You can either use the Preflight tool in Acrobat to check image resolution across the entire document _OR_ use the Object Inspector tool to check in for a single image.

 

[muminn]

Quite of Box of Tricks

Quite of Box of Tricks

Quite of Box of Tricks has this option.

 

[mattbeals]

Acrobat Pro 9 is perfectly capable of checking the resolution with the built in preflighting module. I don't recall if InDesign CS4 shows the effective resolution of the placed image. Your printer/publisher/etc certainly can work with images under 300 dpi. A 250 or 225 dpi image is perfectly usable. It is a preference of 300 dpi that most printers and publishers have. I always asked my clients and my advertisers (commercial print and magazine publishing days) and got it some of the time. As long as the image was at least 225 dpi for CMYK we were fine.

If you need help with the preflighting function of Acrobat 9 Pro please feel free to call and we can discuss it. All the basics of what you need are in Acrobat 9 Pro.

 

[o.druemmer@callassoftware]

A PDF (or even a PDF page for that purpose) is not an image and does not have a resolution for the PDF as a whole. While you can write a single page PDF with just an image on that page (e.g. when savign an image as PDF in Photoshop) Indesign still sees it as a PDF...

Image resolution (obviously) only applies to an image. Now one could argue that Indesign should look inside an imprted PDF page and check the effective resolution of images in that PDF page - but it doesn't. Same applies to imported EPS.

Safest approach anyway is to double check afetr PDF export in Acrobat 9 as already described in this thread. Why safest? Bevause on exporting to PDF downsampling could kick in and bring an original 300 ppi image down to 72 ppi. So better check the file to be used for further production rather than (only) relying on the material used for putting that file together.

My 2 cents

Olaf Drümmer

 

[mattbeals]

Using the built in preflight function of Acrobat Pro here is a video of how you can determine the image resolution throughout a PDF.

Use Acrobats preflight feature to list all images resolutions

I'm using the Sheetfed preflight profile but only analyzing the document. You can see how quickly you get a report for the whole document.

 

[Andy D]

I believe in InDesign CS4 the resolution of an image is displayed in the links palette.

 

[mattbeals]

Yes, I recall that it does show the effective resolution. Unfortunately it can't peek into a placed PDF.