Working with images in a book is a bit challenging. I am just finishing up my first book with color plates – 20 of them! And 10 photos. And one Photoshop Document. YOWZER!!!
I was a bit sloppy when I started. My photos were scattered all over the hard-drive and although they were quite large, they were set at 72 dpi. Their effective dpi (density of pixels after image scaling) looked high enough. What the hell… just pull it all together.
WRONG!
The printing company almost always has a automatic checking system. These digital gatekeepers always find something they don’t like. Usually it is my painstaking calculation of spine width, but sometimes it is image quality. They give you a choice of over-riding the rejection, but they remind you that the consequences are yours alone. They told you! And in the case of Ingramspark, they are going to charge you if you need to revise and upload new files after over-riding their objections. I decided not to risk it.
I gathered all the images and put them in a folder. I went through the photos, one by one and resized and resampled so they were each 3 inches tall and 300 dpi. I pulled the new images into the document. I started thinking that I was ready.
Last night I was looking for information about the quality control system at Ingramspark. I found a discussion on a forum of InDesign book production workers, complaining about the inscrutable file checkers at that company. No one in the forum had much good to say, and the ones that claimed they had no problems, were passive, offering no argument to the naysayers. It rattled my self-confidence and it highlighted the sheer audacity of me thinking I could handle this size of project. How dare I think it was easy! No, I had to gird myself for failure or suffer the humiliation of another dismal file rejection.
Holy moly! I didn’t expect that the file checking gods at Ingramspark would just give my files their blessing and ask for my credit card. It really happened! Give them 48 hours to check it out, and we could be ready to start selling copies.
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The moral to the story:
- use high quality images,
- scale them to your project with 300 dpi, and
- put them all in a folder you can send to me.