Printed screen art in Frame 6 book

[Thomas Neuburger <thomasn -at- twelfthnight -dot- com>]

(Cross-posted to several Frame- and PDF-interested lists.)

Hello,

I said I would document the method I used in creating the screen art in The
Masters Series-FrameMaker 6. By now many of you have the book, so you can
check the results for yourself.

Note: We printed PDF-to-plate on a 2400dpi Heidelberg in one color.


The procedure:

1. Capture screen in SnagIt @ 72dpi (native for my monitor).

2. Save image as 8-bit tiff.

3. Open the tiff in PhotoShop, discarding color information when prompted.

4. Change to grayscale (select Image / Mode / Grayscale).

5. Change resolution to 150dpi with interpolation turned off (select Image
/ Image Size). With interpolation off here, the images size automatically
changes to about half as large.

6. Save as PhotoShop EPS with:
      binary encoding
      interpolation on
      8-bit tiff preview

     Here's where interpolation matters, as Dov Isaacs has pointed out many
times.

7. Import EPS as is into FrameMaker (no resizing).

This process produced a slightly better (or an imagined slightly better)
image when PDF'ed and test-printed to Docutech than resizing in step 5 to
300 dpi with bicubic interpolation on, then resizing to 50% in FrameMaker.
In either case, the test output was very good, but we thought we saw a
difference.

For reference, I've included two memo's from Dov to the lists.

Best,

Tom Neuburger
www.twelfthnight.com


=================
Dov recently wrote:

The only consistent and way to get screen prints into FrameMaker (or any
other GDI-type Windows application such as Microsoft Office applications)
such that resultant print output and PDF viewing and printing is of high
quality is via the EPS format from Photoshop with the "interpolation"
option enabled when doing the EPS export. (Use the "binary" option; do NOT
use the JPEG compression option!!) All other formats are subject to strange
resampling by FrameMaker or the drivers and possibly failure to compress
and/or downsample properly in Distiller.


-----------------
Dov's recommended method from a different message:

Our recommendation is to NOT resample or interpolate the screen shots at
all prior to print or display.

Take screen shots into Photoshop 6, save as EPS with the binary and image
interpolation options selected, but don't doing any image scaling or
resampling in Photoshop.

If you want a grayscale version of the screen shot, do that conversion in
Photoshop prior to saving.

Import the EPS into FrameMaker. You can scale (make sure you uniformly
scale horizontal and vertical) in FrameMaker.

Note that the EPS preview will look like crud, but this is only a "preview"
of the high quality image. Create PDF from the resultant FrameMaker
document. That "image interpolation" option from the EPS export will result
in the
highest quality rescaling when displaying in Acrobat or Acrobat Reader or
printing to a PostScript printer either from FrameMaker directly or from
the resultant PDF file.

I have checked other imaging editing programs and I have not found any
other that is cognizant of the "image interpolation" flag for PostScript,
EPS, and PDF. (Note that we are NOT talking about doing a static
interpolation inside the editing program, but rather, providing a flag to
trigger high quality image interpolation in Acrobat and in Adobe PostScript
printers.)



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From: Thomas Neuburger <thomasn -at- twelfthnight -dot- com>
Subject: Printed screen art in my Frame 6 book
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Hi all,

I said I would document the method I used in creating the screen art in The
Masters Series-FrameMaker 6. By now many of you have the book, so you can
check the results for yourself.

Note: We printed PDF-to-plate on a 2400dpi Heidelberg in one color.


The procedure:

1. Capture screen in SnagIt @ 72dpi (native for my monitor).

2. Save image as 8-bit tiff.

3. Open the tiff in PhotoShop, discarding color information when prompted.

4. Change to grayscale (select Image / Mode / Grayscale).

5. Change resolution to 150dpi with interpolation turned off (select Image
/ Image Size). With interpolation off here, the images size automatically
changes to about half as large.

6. Save as PhotoShop EPS with:
      binary encoding
      interpolation on
      8-bit tiff preview

    Here's where interpolation matters, as Dov Isaacs has pointed out many
times.

7. Import EPS as is into FrameMaker (no resizing).

This process produced a slightly better (or an imagined slightly better)
image when PDF'ed and test-printed to Docutech than resizing in step 5 to
300 dpi with bicubic interpolation on, then resizing to 50% in FrameMaker.
In either case, the test output was very good, but we thought we saw a
difference.

For reference, I've included two memos from Dov to the lists.

Best,

Tom Neuburger
www.twelfthnight.com


=================
Dov recently wrote:

The only consistent and way to get screen prints into FrameMaker (or any
other GDI-type Windows application such as Microsoft Office applications)
such that resultant print output and PDF viewing and printing is of high
quality is via the EPS format from Photoshop with the "interpolation"
option enabled when doing the EPS export. (Use the "binary" option; do NOT
use the JPEG compression option!!) All other formats are subject to strange
resampling by FrameMaker or the drivers and possibly failure to compress
and/or downsample properly in Distiller.


-----------------
Dov's recommended method from a different message:

Our recommendation is to NOT resample or interpolate the screen shots at
all prior to print or display.

Take screen shots into Photoshop 6, save as EPS with the binary and image
interpolation options selected, but don't doing any image scaling or
resampling in Photoshop.

If you want a grayscale version of the screen shot, do that conversion in
Photoshop prior to saving.

Import the EPS into FrameMaker. You can scale (make sure you uniformly
scale horizontal and vertical) in FrameMaker.

Note that the EPS preview will look like crud, but this is only a "preview"
of the high quality image. Create PDF from the resultant FrameMaker
document. That "image interpolation" option from the EPS export will result
in the
highest quality rescaling when displaying in Acrobat or Acrobat Reader or
printing to a PostScript printer either from FrameMaker directly or from
the resultant PDF file.

I have checked other imaging editing programs and I have not found any
other that is cognizant of the "image interpolation" flag for PostScript,
EPS, and PDF. (Note that we are NOT talking about doing a static
interpolation inside the editing program, but rather, providing a flag to
trigger high quality image interpolation in Acrobat and in Adobe PostScript
printers.) 


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