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Visit the new InDes­ign Prepress Sec­tion: Adobe InDes­ign: Prepress Tech­niques

There are a vari­ety of meth­ods for tak­ing a Pho­toshop file and pla­cing to into InDes­ign. After over a year of InDes­ign 2.0 in pro­duc­tion use, I thought it oppor­tune to expose another work­flow choice taken by these cus­tom­ers. It dir­ectly relates to the place­ment of files from Pho­toshop into InDes­ign 2.0 layouts.

Apart from sup­port­ing the tra­di­tional TIFF (.tif) file format, InDes­ign also per­mits the place­ment of JPEG (.jpeg, .jpe, .jpg), Macin­tosh PICT, GIF, Port­able Net­work Graph­ics (PNG) and other bitmap-style formats.

The most com­monly touted method is to save an Adobe Pho­toshop .psd file, and place this into InDes­ign 2.0. Trans­par­ency, oth­er­wise known as alpha chan­nel sup­port, is fully sup­por­ted in InDes­ign 2.0. What does not work, how­ever, are vec­tor lay­ers. When placed into InDes­ign 2.0, vec­tor lay­ers includ­ing text lay­ers are ras­ter­ised at the res­ol­u­tion of the Pho­toshop file (or trans­par­ency flattener, depend­ing on the mech­an­ics of the file).

Example 1: Pho­toshop image, con­tain­ing Trans­par­ency as shown by the check­er­board pattern.

Example 2: The same Pho­toshop image, con­tain­ing Trans­par­ency, placed into InDes­ign. The trans­par­ency is respected.

With Pho­toshop 6.0, and included in Pho­toshop 7.0, Adobe added the abil­ity to save a Pho­toshop PDF file. Pho­toshop PDF has many bene­fits, and also shares many of the fea­tures of the Pho­toshop PSD format.

This format, like the Pho­toshop PSD format, has the fol­low­ing features

• Trans­par­ency sup­port.
• Pho­toshop lay­ers. includ­ing text lay­ers, adjust­ment lay­ers, layer masks etc are saved in the same file

Addi­tion­ally, Pho­toshop PDF has the fol­low­ing fea­tures that Pho­toshop PSD does not have:

• Its PDF. can be dis­played in the free Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Vec­tor lay­ers. keep­ing text/vector shapes kept as vec­tor shapes for crisp print­ing and screen viewing)
• Secur­ity. using the secur­ity fea­tures of Adobe PDF, your images can be locked from viewing/editing by other people.

• Com­pres­sion. images can be com­pressed using ZIP(lossless: no pixels are hurt) or JPEG (lossy: image data is changed)

With InDes­ign, Adobe has added sup­port for the place­ment of PDF files without hav­ing to resort to “mak­ing and EPS” to ensure qual­ity out­put. InDes­ign 2.0 also per­mits the place­ment of PDF files that con­tain trans­par­ency inform­a­tion — and holds the trans­par­ency information.

To save a Pho­toshop PDF for place­ment into InDes­ign, the go to File>Save As.

Example 4: File>Save As. Choos­ing Pho­toshop PDF, here I am sav­ing the lay­ers (per­mit­ting late stage edit­ing of the text layer if I wish)

Example 5: File>Save As. Choos­ing Pho­toshop PDF: a sub­sequent dia­log box per­mits the sav­ing of Trans­par­ency, apply­ing secur­ity and in this par­tic­u­lar file: retain the vec­tor data as vector.

This Pho­toshop PDF can be placed into InDes­ign — the the same as any PDF. When placed into InDes­ign 2.0, the file looks sim­ilar to the fol­low­ing. Notice I am only see­ing the Proxy View of the image:

In the above example, I have turned on “High Qual­ity Dis­play”. The vec­tor qual­ity of the text, and any vec­tor shape lay­ers (includ­ing vec­tor clip­ping groups) are respec­ted; just as they are respec­ted when print­ing or export­ing as PDF or EPS.

Addi­tion­ally, it is worth not­ing that the file exten­sions sup­por­ted by Pho­toshop PDF are .pdf and .pdp

What is the dif­fer­ence? Noth­ing, apart from the file exten­sion. The con­tents are exactly the same. The reason why there are two options is for the Win­dows plat­form. On Win­dows, the exten­sion is used to asso­ci­ate a file with an applic­a­tion. .pdf is asso­ci­ated with Adobe Acrobat. When you double click on a file, this dot exten­sion is used to assist Win­dows in determ­in­ing which applic­a­tion to launch to view the file. With InDes­ign 2.0, when using the con­tex­tual menu “Graphics>Edit Ori­ginal”, this asso­ci­ation is also used. As this is a Pho­toshop PDF, and nor­mally when editing/viewing the file — you would like to show it in Pho­toshop, an addi­tional exten­sion is per­mit­ted: .pdp, or Pho­toshop PDF.

I would recom­mend using the .pdp exten­sion when sav­ing a file from Pho­toshop as a Pho­toshop PDF. There were changes in InDes­ign 2.0 and 2.0.1 to sup­port .pdp as equivilent to .pdf.

For MacOS users, the exten­sion for InDes­ign 2.0 files is .indd

In fact, I would always use Pho­toshop PDF as the primary format when tak­ing files from Adobe Pho­toshop to InDes­ign. There are no down­sides: the file size is smal­ler, vec­tor text and lay­ers are sup­por­ted and kept as vector.