How to reduce image quality for photos in Corel

[Stacey K]

I'm no photo expert - get that out of the way first. I'm making 4'x8' signs for the baseball field. A designer sent me a file that was 74mb large. It's comprised of a banner across with the business info and 3 separate photos underneath. She also has another layer with all of it saved as one bitmap. Am I able to reduce the resolution of the 3 photos if so how do I do that in Corel? Or should I ask her to do it? 300 is plenty good. When I zoom in I can darn near count the dust particles in the photo on the product they are advertising - for real. Usually I'm dealing with crappy photos but at 300' from the stands there's no need for such detail, nobody will see it. Thank you!

 

[myront]

300dpi is overkill. We usually don't send prints higher than 150dpi. Select the bitmap then choose Bitmap/Resample from the top menu. Another thing we do when exporting for print, if exporting as tiff, is set the compression type to LZW Compression. This will cut the file save down tremendously. What size dimensionally is the banner?

 

[Stacey K]

Overall size is 4'x8'...I'm doing as you say now...

 

[MikePro]

in corel, its Image > Resample

 

[Stacey K]

300dpi is overkill. We usually don't send prints higher than 150dpi. Select the bitmap then choose Bitmap/Resample from the top menu. Another thing we do when exporting for print, if exporting as tiff, is set the compression type to LZW Compression. This will cut the file save down tremendously. What size dimensionally is the banner?

It worked! That wasn't so hard, thank you for the quick reply!!

 

[ikarasu]

Now that you have an answer I won't be derailing the thread!

Just curious... How come you guys downsize? Is it to save space, processing time when ripping? Or something else?

 

[Andy D]

Funny, I have always just selected "convert to bitmap" even if it's already a bitmap and picked the dpi I wanted, pretty much the same thing without some whistles and bells.

 

[Andy D]

Now that you have an answer I won't be derailing the thread!

Just curious... How come you guys downsize? Is it to save space, processing time when ripping? Or something else?

Sometime you are required to convert it to bitmap, even if it's already a bitmap, to make changes, such as cropping... I'm assuming that the resample does this too.
Also, as you said, it speeds up saving, opening, exporting & ripping.

 

[ikarasu]

I do it so I can email a proof that is under 5mb all the time.

Ahh, proof wise that makes sense! I'm never involved in proofing, so I didn't even think of it. I think one time I made a proof out of a huge file... I just Rasterized the whole artboard in illustrator and resized it, shrunk it down pretty small.


I "Believe" when we do proofs at work and we're saving to PDF, our graphics team that use Illustrator has a Compression preset and will auto downsize all the images to whatever you specify as it's saving the file.... Not sure if Corel has that option, but I imagine it comes in handy to have a proof preset and have it do it automatically.

I havent played with Corel in a long time, might be time to buy it again!

 

[Stacey K]

Now that you have an answer I won't be derailing the thread!

Just curious... How come you guys downsize? Is it to save space, processing time when ripping? Or something else?

I don't print in-house so I do have some restrictions and recommendations for artwork when uploading and printing. I also don't feel like waiting 30 minutes for a file to upload to the site I use

 

[Andy D]

Ahh, proof wise that makes sense! I'm never involved in proofing, so I didn't even think of it. I think one time I made a proof out of a huge file... I just Rasterized the whole artboard in illustrator and resized it, shrunk it down pretty small.


I "Believe" when we do proofs at work and we're saving to PDF, our graphics team that use Illustrator has a Compression preset and will auto downsize all the images to whatever you specify as it's saving the file.... Not sure if Corel has that option, but I imagine it comes in handy to have a proof preset and have it do it automatically.

I havent played with Corel in a long time, might be time to buy it again!

Corel does have a down sampling option for images when exporting to PDF, but sometimes it works better when a imported images are converted in Corel.

Stacey K , Just a FYI, I'm not sure if it happens when resampling, every once in a while a image will look washed out or color shift when I convert to bitmap, when that happens I undo and re-convert to bitmap as a RGB, if that doesn't fix it, I will export as a TIFF, choosing a lower DPI and import it back in.

 

[Bobby H]

I use the re-sampling (aka down-rezzing) option in the CorelDRAW "Publish to PDF" dialog box all the time. You can automatically reduce high res images to more e-mail friendly file sizes. You can adjust the levels of JPEG compression. You also have the option to use LZW compression if you don't want a certain image lossy compressed.

Also it's pretty easy to convert a bunch of vector-based artwork into pixel-based form (and even riddle it with water marks) within CorelDRAW prior to exporting it in PDF format to send to clients.

 

[myront]

...
Just curious... How come you guys downsize? Is it to save space, processing time when ripping? Or something else?

Client supplies a psd file via dropbox. File is 300 inches at 300 dpi. HUGE! First thing I do is "downsample" it. Oh yeah, did I mention the file was just text! And yes, the larger the file the longer it takes to RIP.
As far as proofs go I often use 8bit png around 800px wide x whatever it scales. We use to use a password protected pdf form until I found out the whole password protection can still be bypassed. We just send a simple png file. So many just view it on their phone anyway.

 

[unclebun]

If the issue is uploading to print provider, but you have room to save it on your hard drive, another option is to just export the whole layout as a 150 or 100 dpi jpg.

 

[iPrintStuff]

You guys should meet the “designer” I had to work with today. 12 2’ by 3’ posters. Simple artwork. Really not much going on.

1.2GB... and still pixelated. If I wasnt so mad I’d be impressed!

 

[Bobby H]

12 2’ by 3’ posters. Simple artwork. Really not much going on. 1.2GB... and still pixelated. If I wasnt so mad I’d be impressed!

Someone probably told the "designer" the artwork had to be 300dpi. So what do they do? Artificially up-rez it to 300dpi.