Publisher: Any easy way to upsample all "Placed image DPI too low" images in a document?

[Ken Hjulstrom]

Hi,

I periodically use Publisher 2 to create a magazine that contains many images.  When I'm done, Preflight generates quite a few "Placed image DPI too low" messages" that I need to clear up in order to have a suitable press-ready PDF.  Due to the nature of the magazine layout process, the original DPI of images may reduced below 300 DPI if it's sufficiently enlarged, and I ignore these warnings during the layout process, since there's no point in upsampling images until I'm sure of their final dimensions in the magazine.  I've just finished my most recent magazine layout, and now have 79 images that need to be upsampled so they'll have a high enough resolution for printing.

There doesn't seem to be a way to use Photo's batch job feature to do a bulk upsampling of these image files, since Photo can only "see" the internal DPI of the image files, and not how much the DPI has changed due to resizing of the images in the Publisher file.  Currently, the way that I upsample these image files is to open each one in Photo, go to Document | Resize Document, and modify the "Width" value by multiplying it by "(desired_dpi / current_publisher_dpi)", and then exporting the file over the existing version.  As an example, if the image width is 189 px, the current Publisher DPI of the image is 200 DPI, and I want the Publisher DPI for the image to be 325 DPI, I'd change the "189 px" width to be "(325/200)*189 px" and click "Resize", making sure that the "Resample" checkbox was checked, and then do File | Export to export the file over its old version.  and then go back to Publisher's Resource Manager window and use the "Update" option to update the old version of the image in the document with the new one (all of the document's images are linked).

Outside of using Photo's batch job facility to grossly upsample all of the images, is there any way to accomplish what I'm currently doing manually in a more efficient manner?  It would be nice if there were some way that Publisher's Preflight would have an option to upsample each image for which a warning were displayed so it would end up with a consistent DPI of my choosing, but I don't believe that such functionality currently exists.  But is there a more efficient way to accomplish what I need to do?

Thanks,

Ken

 

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, Ken Hjulstrom said:

It would be nice if there were some way that Publisher's Preflight would have an option to upsample each image for which a warning were displayed so it would end up with a consistent DPI of my choosing, but I don't believe that such functionality currently exists.  But is there a more efficient way to accomplish what I need to do?

The first versions of APub did (automatically) upsample on export to the export DPI. This was removed with an early update.

Workaround: in V1 an image that is cropped by a vector mask (Vector Crop Tool) still gets upsampled on export. I can't tell if this works in V2, too, nor do I know whether it is a meant as a feature by design or is a bug in V1 (though it was reported a few times in the forum). However, it may be worth a trial.

Disadvantage: not only you need to create a masking object for every image (additional "Picture Frame" layers don't work this way), also the pure existence of the masking rectangle is not sufficient to cause upsampling, it appears to work only if the image gets cropped slightly at least at one edge.

Example: 300 dpi document and export. In the middle a tiny image in 100% / 300 dpi, on the left + right at 400 % / 75 dpi, the right image is cropped with the Vector Crop Tool. Compare the results in the attached PDF: left + centre image 100x100 px <-> right image upscaled to 400x390 px appears less jaggy.

v1105 upsampling.pdf