Export of .png files and use in indesign

[RoelBego]

Hé guys and girls,

 

I've been using Affinity Designer for icon design the last few weeks, such a nice tool. When I export these files to .png and use them in Sketch it's all working good. When I export them in 300 dpi (64x64) and use them in Indesign the icons are very blurry and setting the display quality to high doesn't do anything. 

 

Is there something I am doing wrong? Or do I have a preset setting wrong?

 

There is a screenshot with it, the icon in indesign at 300 dpi at 100%.

[rdksl]

Hi @RoelBego,

 

can you supply the original icon file?

 

If you designed and saved the icon file at the size of 64 x 64 px, in the print document at 300dpi you will only be able to get the size of about 0.21 x 0.21 inches. Try resizing it to this size and look at 100%, should be sharp.

 

Sketch app is made for digital design, therefore works at the display 72dpi, which allows you to show icon at full 64px size without any artifacts at 100% display view.

 

You should know what size in inches/milimeters you want to get in InDesign and then use simple maths to count the pixel size you need to export.

For example:
You want the icon to be 1 x 1 inch in InDesign. Knowing the density is 300dpi (dots per inch), you need the icon png to be 300 x 300 pixels to render nicely at 100%.

 

Hope it helped. Correct me if I didn't understand your question properly  :)

[rdksl]

One more picture. When you imported your 64px to 300dpi document and tried to resize to the size you had it in Sketch, you got rasterized result, because Sketch uses 72dpi (therefore consumes less pixels to draw at certain display size than 300dpi document).

 

[A_B_C]

Are you sure that you used the correct Display Performance settings for your placed image in Indesign? Does changing these (either on object or document level) make a difference?  :)

[R C-R]

RoelBego,

 

What you describe as blurriness is also called "jaggies," or more formally as aliasing artifacts. It occurs because rasterized (also called bitmapped) images are composed of a rectilinear grid of pixels (also sometimes called dots, although that isn't really the same thing), each of which can have only a single color/intensity value.

 

So like rdksl said, if you rasterize your vector logo to a 64 by 64 pixel size on export without any form of antialiasing, any part of a vector outline that doesn't exactly & completely fill one of those pixels will be converted into a stair-stepped, jagged line like in your screenshot. Applying antialiasing on export, like with Affinity's resample options, will eliminate the stair steps, but it can only do so by averaging the color/intensity of everything that lies within or near each pixel down to one value, which causes blurriness & loss of detail.

[RoelBego]

Are you sure that you used the correct Display Performance settings for your placed image in Indesign? Does changing these (either on object or document level) make a difference?  :)

I have tried that option :) unfortunately it didn't do anything.