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Black and white line drawings in quark

Last post 09-17-2008 11:52 AM by Karam. 7 replies.
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  • 09-15-2008 4:10 PM

    Black and white line drawings in quark

    Hi

    I am trying to scan a black and white line drawing and insert it into quark but I keep finding that the image is pixelated by the time it gets there.  I've tried setting the scanning settings to 600dpi and saving it as a jpeg.  I then open it in photoshop and change the levels to make it more contrasted and add a layer to make the white background transparent.  In photoshop this image then looks really good, but when I put it into quark as a picture it looks all jaggedy.  I tried saving it as a vector file (eps) but that was even worse!  Please help - its driving me mad!

    Thanks

    Karen

     

  • 09-15-2008 5:32 PM In reply to

    Re: Black and white line drawings in quark

    Try 1200 dpi and choose the line drawing section in your scanner.  Also, follow this tutorial about transparency: http://www.mediacollege.com/adobe/photoshop/transparent/background.html

    I hope this helps. 

     

  • 09-15-2008 5:36 PM In reply to

    Re: Black and white line drawings in quark

    I forgot to mention, we always save as .tiffs.  It may look jagged because of the low resolution turned on, but the final pdf is great.

  • 09-15-2008 6:21 PM In reply to

    Re: Black and white line drawings in quark

     And if you need it to look better on the screen for placement, you can enhance the preview, but it will slow things down a bit, so I usually enhance it, position it, then return to the low-res preview.

  • 09-15-2008 7:06 PM In reply to

    Re: Black and white line drawings in quark

    If your artwork is super clean, you can probably get away with just scanning it as a bitmap at a minimum of 600dpi (800 or 1200 is better), but DON'T save it as a JPEG (that will probably add artifacts that you don't want) -- save it as TIFF. When you save a Photoshop file as EPS, it's not a vector image, it's just a bitmap EPS, so you don't gain anything there.

     

    If your artwork needs to be cleaned up, what I do is scan as a grayscale TIFF at high resolution (again, 600-1200 dpi) -- the file might be huge, but it won't stay that way. Since it's grayscale, you can do things in Photoshop that you can't do with a bitmap. Specifically, you can adjust levels to control the "thickness" of the lines. Or use Image/Adjust/Threshold to do the same thing -- this gives you a preview of how the image will look when you convert it to a straight B&W bitmap, which would be the last step. When you make that conversion and save as TIFF, your file size will go way down.

    XPress 8.1 | Mac Pro 2.66 | 8GB | OS 10.5.7
  • 09-16-2008 2:36 AM In reply to

    • Emma
    • Top 10 Contributor
    • Joined on 07-07-2004
    • Leeds, UK
    • Posts 1,184

    Re: Black and white line drawings in quark

    Does it look ok when printed or pdf'd? That is the main thing. What you see in Quark is not supposed to be print-perfect, it's only a representation.
  • 09-17-2008 9:17 AM In reply to

    Re: Black and white line drawings in quark

    The words 'pre' and 'press' come to mind ;-)
  • 09-17-2008 11:52 AM In reply to

    • Karam
    • Top 500 Contributor
    • Joined on 07-03-2006
    • Posts 37
    • Quark Employee

    Re: Black and white line drawings in quark

     Hi Karen,

     Try applying Full Resolution Preview on the image once its imported and check the results.

    You can apply Full resolution Preview by doing a Ctrl+Click(Mac) or right click(Windows) on the image and Choosing Full Resolution Preview from the Preview resolution tab.

    Regards

    Karam 

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