Recently designed some stationary for a client. The logo consisted of a a circular chrome shape with a car in the middle. It was saved CMYK at 300dpi at quite a high dimension size.

When i layed it up in Indesign. The logo only needed to be very small on the letter head. I saved it out as a PDF and sent it for an Iris proof at the printers. I was surprised at the quality of the logo which appeared to have jaggies around the circular part of the logo.

Is this because of the original size of my tif or are there things to watch out for in the PDF settings?

Its hard to say without actually looking at the file, however there are a few things to remember when doing this sort of thing.

Resizing raster images can cause problems, although technically sizing down shouldnt cause too many problems. Even so if its a large image and reduced quite small its possible the interpolation of the image caused some of image quality loss.

Another factor might be the PDF settings. Generally speaking PDF automatically chooses compression method unless specifically selected otherwise (either jpeg or ZIP), and with jpegs there are of course several different quality settings. Double check your compression settings in Iindesign when you export to PDF, make sure it resamples to 300dpi (bicubic downsampling) if its going to print. Or if you print to distiller make sure your job options are for print or press this should provide the quality you are looking for.

Besides the PDF settings it could be a transparency setting it InDesign. As Steel says though it is hard to tell without seeing the file.

One thing to remember too is that just becuase something is 300DPI it doesn't mean that it will be pixelation free. I can take a 72dpi image and upsize it to 300DPI and it will look like crap. I doubt this is your case though.

Methinks it was the original illustrator raster effects settings. Just upgraded to CS and havent gotten used to the workflow yet. Will find out Wed though when it comes back from print. :cheeky: Thanks for your suggestions