Of course you can assuming that you have high resolution images. Just
because an image is high resolution does not mean that they are any
good. More dots per inch does not necessarily equate to higher quality.
there is a point of diminishing returns and a point where you just screw
up a perfectly good (or bad) picture by having too much resolution.
If you look at the settings for high quality and commercial press you'll
notice that they are the same, images over 450 DPI are down sampled to
300 DPI, monochrome images over 3600 DPI are down sampled to 2400. Both
settings are exceedingly over any necessary requirements for general
printing. Even for "high quality" printing... God, I just love how
"quality this" or "quality that" get tossed around. Quality printing at
133 LPI looks good. Not so good quality at 133 looks like crap. Same
thing with 200 LPI an 10 micron Staccato. If it ain't done right it's
going to like crap. If it's done right, it's going to look good.
PDF's are made smaller for web posting and emailing but not necessarily
by changing the resolution down drastically. Sometimes it is as simple
as changing the image compression method, and amount, as well as making
a modest change in resolution. Like I said above, having too much
resolution is a bad thing. Actually, being a bit under the resolution
threshold is a bit better than being over sampled. The last thing you
want is a super-high res PDF like 1200 DPI and uncompressed. You want
300 DPI for color and grayscale images and 1200 to 2400 for monochrome
images. Without getting into all the technical details of halftones,
spot sizes, dot sizes, screen frequencies and angles suffice it to say
that 300/1200 is plenty of information to produce a quality piece. You
can reproduce images as low as 225 DPI at 150 LPI. The idea of having no
compression is of no real consequence and generally absurd. Having some
compression is a good thing if you are sending files over the internet.
Even if you are storing them it's not a bad thing. Modern computing
power is so high at this point that the CPU cycles required for
compressing image data while being normalized is modest at best. I doubt
you will see a significant speed improvement by going with no image
compression. ZIP compression is lossless, meaning image data is not
deleted in order to achieve a higher level of compression. You end up
with lower compression ratios but you also preserve all the original
image data. Whereas JPEG and JPEG2000 are lossy image compression
formats. Lossy meaning image data is deleted (somewhat intelligently)in
order to achieve greater compression ratios. The higher the quality
setting for JPEG and JPEG2000 the less image data is removed. Conversely
the lower the quality level the more data is removed. JPEG2000 suffers
less from artifacts than JPEG does, but not many applications and
printers support JPEG2000. JPEG also suffers from the problem of
progressive saving causing more data loss which results in more
artifacts becoming obvious. The problem is that every time you save a
JPEG in an image editor you go through the entire image compression
sequence each time you save the document. Each time you do that data is
averaged and then deleted. Do it a few times and you'll see what
happens. In Acrobat Distiller the default for some settings is to
preserve the original JPEG encoding whenever possible.
Chances are that what ever scanner you might be using won't have the
dynamic range or the level of optics and image processing to produce a
high quality scan. Digital camera's aren't much better unless you get
into DSLR's. Many point and shoot cameras can produce quite stunning
results if basic rules of photography are followed. I've seen some real
shitty pictures taken with $30,000 Leaf digital camera backs. I've got
some great pictures from my Sony DSC-W7, a $180 7MP digital camera.
Heck, for most applications shooting at 5MP is as good as shooting at 7MP.
Whether you use Publisher, Scribus, PageMaker, InDesign, Quark, Ready
Set Go!, Apple Pages or some other program you can get excellent results
if you follow some basic rules about desktop publishing, image
reproduction and prepress/printing. If you want to do it right, use the
right techniques and forget the idea that bigger is better. Often bigger
causes more problems than it creates benefits and results in a piece of
junk being printed.
Matt Beals
Consultant
Enfocus Certified Trainer
Markzware Recognized Trainer
(206) 201-2320 - Main
(720) 367-3869 - eFax
mailto:
[email protected]
Come visit me at:
http://www.automatetheworkflow.com
http://www.mattbeals.com
http://forums.mattbeals.com
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