<p>When I am at 100% zoom on InDesign, everything looks crystal clear and sharp, but after sending it to a PDF file on maximum settings, everything looks blurry at 100% zoom or even 75% on Adobe Reader. Any way around this?</p>
<p>Why are you doing PDF? Check your PDF creation settings to make sure it is not downsampling any images. I assume you are talking about images?</p>
<p>PDF also often compress your original images too, check to make sure there are no compression in the settings.</p>
<p>hankdd, if you are trying send this to a professional printer, you are better off sending them the uncompressed JPEG file. Its better to talk to the printer and have them help you instead of trying to give them a PDF that may not be optimal.</p>
<p>BTW, my daughter did not use a professional printer for her portfolio. Since most of her pieces are pencil drawings, she took them into photoshop, change the color mode into BW, resize it to the correct aspect ratio, then save it as highest quality JPEG file. We just sent that to costco photo center and it looked really good. Just thought I offer some advice so you don’t waste money. She was accepted to USC and Syracuse.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice. I was and am most likely not planning to print via PDF due to the quality reduction, despite turning off all image compression in the export settings. I was just wondering if anyone knew any way to avoid the quality reduction, but I’m guessing that it’s inevitable. If there is indeed a way to avoid any reduction, then I would use a PDF since it’s easier to handle due to all of the files being in one place. But for now, I will most likely stick with using the uncompressed jpeg files.</p>
<p>I am planning to create a bound book, so printing it myself doesn’t seem the best way to go since I’m not an “expert printer” or book binder.</p>
<p>Just a thought for you. My daugther printed everything as photo, the colored pieces turned out nicely too. We sent them out to the photo places to print them, then insert them into the professional artists portfolio binders (Itoya) brand, they are really nice, just an alternative to consider. All we did was to trim and insert the photos in the right order. Good luck.</p>
<p>Since you are planning to send the ID file to the printer, if you used any custom fonts, make sure to include those with said file.</p>
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<p>If they are printing uncompressed jpeg images (not PSD or PDF files with text layers), I don’t need to do that since the text is part of the image.</p>