Blurry pixels

Some background: we had some designs created by a freelance artist using Illustrator. We would like to make some changes to those designs, but would like to use Xara Designer as it fits our budget and feels far more user-friendly (at least to us non-designers).

Here is the design when viewed in Xara Designer at 'Very high quality':

Attachment 88609

Note the two areas highlighted by the red rectangle.

Here is the design when exported to PDF/X-3, as viewed in Acrobat Reader:

Attachment 88610

Note that the left highlighted area is sharper than the right area, and is also sharper than the image viewed in Designer above.

At the printers, as they do not use Xara Designer, they had to import the PDF into Illustrator. Here is the design when viewed in Illustrator:

Attachment 88611

which looks pretty much the same as when viewed in Acrobat Reader i.e. the right rectangle area is blurry compared to the left.

However, when the 'frame' object is moved (upwards) away from the green area (highlighted by the red oval), we can see that the underlying image (the right rectangle area) is actually as sharp as the left rectangle area.

Attachment 88612

What is the cause of this? Xara Designer seems to export the green background just fine, but when it needed to fill in the green area in the frame object (the one containing the words 'Set 3'), it does so at a lower resolution?

Thanks in advance.

The green background that the designer used. Is it a bitmap? And if so, what is the resolution of the bitmap?

If the image is going to be displayed on the web then 96dpi is OK. If the image is going to be used for commercial printing, then it has to be 300-600 dpi. You cannot make an image that is low resolution, high resolution unless you physically reduce the image but about 1/3 or more which makes the image smaller but increases the resolution. If you go the other direction, that is, make the image larger, the resolution will decrease proportionately and the image will become blurry.

My question is, as you are not experienced in design, do you want to be making changes to something that was created in Illustrator in Xara? And why don't you have the designer who created the work in the first place make the modifications?

Yes, it is a bitmap.

This is the image when imported by Illustrator from a PDF/X file generated by Xara Designer:

Attachment 88613

Note that 2 blurry areas as highlighted by the red ovals.

When the brown frame is moved upwards, the underlying green bitmap shows through, and is sharper than the green background that's part of the brown frame:

Attachment 88614

Do you know why this is so? Why is the background not blurry, but the background that's part of the frame object is blurry? This is obvious even when viewed in Acrobat Reader, or Foxit Reader.

This is the frame object when viewed on a white background.

Attachment 88615

As to why we are making the changes ourselves, it's because we only want to change the prices on this design, which is a menu. Should it be this difficult?

Thanks in advance.

It is really hard to tell what is going on by only seeing a portion of the image. In your second example the green wood background is definitely pixelated which says to me that the image has been resized and might look OK on a website but will not print well.

Can you select just the green wood image with the Fill Tool, and if you click twice on the green wood image with the Fill Tool, what is the resolution?

When you say you are viewing the image at very high quality, this just refers to Xara's display mode and had nothing to do with the quality of the image.

A menu? Will this be commercially printed or will you be printing these on a desktop printer?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by yeohray

...When the brown frame is moved upwards, the underlying green bitmap shows through, and is sharper than the green background that's part of the brown frame...

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Check that the frame isn't using shadows or transparencies or other special effects. Xara makes these into bitmaps at the live effect resolution (Utilities -> Options -> Effects & Plugins in the older version I have). That could be the cause of your problem.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by David O'Neil

Check that the frame isn't using shadows or transparencies or other special effects. Xara makes these into bitmaps at the live effect resolution (Utilities -> Options -> Effects & Plugins in the older version I have). That could be the cause of your problem.

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Thank you so much, that was it.