How to keep image size manageable whilst maintaining appropriate resolution

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Ronald

This is most probably a very "rookie" question, however my opinion is that it's better to ask than to stay ignorant even if the question is very elementary.

When importing images into your Scribus document like for example digital photo's or scans you usually resize them within Scribus to suit the lay-out of your page. When simply resizing the image the source file keeps its properties, yet that will make the document size (unnecessarily) big.

Example:
When importing a digital photo with an original file size of 5.4 Mb (resolution 450 DPI) and resizing it to frame of 200 pixels wide by 364 pixels high, the size of the photo remains the 5.4 Mb it originally is for the Scribus document. In order to keep your document size manageable you would want the file size to more or less correlate to the image size used in the document without touching the original resolution to keep quality during printing high.

How do you tackle this issue? Rescaling the original digital photo to the size you want in your Scribus document is of course an option, but if you later want to enlarge the size again in your document you will get quality loss, since you modified the size of your original photo.

Thanks in advance for any reply, Ronald

RodneyLee

Once the image is ready in Scribus you can then Export it at that size, format and set the DPI as desired

RodneyLee


Ronald

I recently (end of last year) had issues that the PDF files I supplied to the printer were irrationally big and causing computer crashes and invisible images in Scribus itself. I split the file into three separate documents which resolved the issue of the images not being visible in Scribus, but still resulted into immensely big files. The problem must be that I imported files and then scaled them but that doesn't change the file size. There must be some intelligent option I assume that resolves this issue.

When you create a document with quite a large number of photo's/scans you quickly run into such issues. In case there is no intelligent way to do this, what is the workaround?

Nermander

If I recall correct there is an option in the PDF export to downsample images that are above a maximum DPI?

toyotadesigner

Just use the resolution settings for PDF export as shown below:



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Ronald

@toyotadesigner, thank you for your reply and clear screenshot to indicate visually what you mean. My reply took some time since I was encountering some IT issues which took time to resolve.

The option you listed automatically reduces the resolution of any image related to the size you chose the image to be in your text? The trouble I experienced before was that an image I imported was for example twice the size of an A4 page, when resizing it to for example 1/4th of an A4 page still the original file size is kept. I also experienced that due to this size my computer froze up and had to split up the document into several parts to avoid computer crashes. Your option to determine the resolution upon export may aid in keeping the size of the export manage-able, but doesn't avoid the initial issue of the file size causing the computer to freeze.


toyotadesigner

Quote from: Ronald on May 31, 2022, 02:50:34 PM
The option you listed automatically reduces the resolution of any image related to the size you chose the image to be in your text?

Yes, when you generate the PDF, the image size will be reduced to the actual size @ 300 dpi.

Quote
The trouble I experienced before was that an image I imported was for example twice the size of an A4 page, when resizing it to for example 1/4th of an A4 page still the original file size is kept. I also experienced that due to this size my computer froze up and had to split up the document into several parts to avoid computer crashes. Your option to determine the resolution upon export may aid in keeping the size of the export manage-able, but doesn't avoid the initial issue of the file size causing the computer to freeze.

If you don't have sufficient RAM on your system, just scale down the image(s) to i.e. 25% of the original size before you import them into your document. If they should be too small for printing, Scribus will show an alert before it generates the PDF. In addition, you will see the character »I« in the lower right corner of your image, which means that either the resolution or the fitting to the image frame are not met.

Use the »Preflight Verifier« to check your document:



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Ronald

Thx again "toyotadesigner". As said the question may seem very trivial to the majority of users, for me it has been a blocking matter. Your responses will most probably help me, thx for your knowledge sharing!