tif to Quark, images not printing sharply, look blueish

MA
Posted By
Marianne_Ackerman
May 26, 2004
Views
150
Replies
4
Status
Closed
I have some 300 ppi Photoshop 7 files which are scans of some pencil line drawings. I have saved them as greyscale tifs and imported them into Quark5 (this is a book project) where I am placing them inside white-filled picture boxes. Most of them are sized in Quark at 50 — 75% of their original size (i.e., I am not enlarging them). The images are printing from Quark to my HP Deskjet 1220 ps printer okay, but they look rather weak and have a blue-ish cast to them. I am printing at 600dpi on matte coated inkjet paper using Adobe Press-Ready settings. Because I was not happy with the output from Quark, as a test I printed them from the orginal Photoshop files using the same Press-Ready settings, same paper, same DeskJet printer and they are sharper and blacker—they don’t have that blue-ish cast, and they are generally stronger. My client has taken the pdfs I have made from the Quark files and he has printed them out at 600dpi at a service bureau and is having the same mediocre result. What are we doing wrong? I must solve this before we go to press!

Thanks for any suggestions. Marianne
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RW
Rene_Walling
May 26, 2004
I suspect the colour cast is a colour management related problem. When Quark spools the porint file, it rewrites TIFFs, dropping out any cropped part of the image and the colour profile among other things.

As for the resolution Quark will sometimes downsample TIFFs it estimates are at too high a resolution, at least I know 3 and 4 did it. This may be the cause of the lack of sharpness

Have you tried saving your images as eps files? This may one or both problems.
MA
Marianne_Ackerman
May 26, 2004
Wonderful suggestion. I saved one of my troublesome Photoshop files both as eps and as a tif and then imported them into Quark and ran comparative test prints. The eps files were significantly darker and crisper than the tif ones. However was I supposed to know not to use tif as a file format in Quark?! And how did you know? You’re a genius.
RW
Rene_Walling
May 27, 2004
And how did you know?

Experience
RW
Rene_Walling
May 27, 2004
Make that painful experience…

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