How to save your InDesign file as a JPEG.
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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So we need to save a JPEG out, ready for some purpose. You might be sticking it into a PowerPoint presentation, or Word document, or sending it to a website to be used as part of a web process, or something, you need a JPEG or a PNG, same principle works.
The one thing I'd say is that, often a PDF will work as well. If I'm putting it into PowerPoint or Word, a PDF will go in. The nice thing about PDFs is that the quality is always a lot better, especially for 'Type', but if you have to use a JPEG, let's do it this way. Let's go to 'File', 'Export', same as the PDF, down the bottom here where it used to say 'Adobe PDF', go down to either 'JPEG' or 'PNG', super easy. I'm going to give it the same name but I'm going to make a 'High Res' version. High resolution, high quality one, you can call it what you like. Hit 'Save'. I'm saving it into that folder on my 'Desktop'. 'All', 'Pages', I'm going to do 'Pages'. We haven't done any 'Spreads', we'll look at that later.
Then the 'Quality'. You got two things that really controls what it looks like. 'Quality', and the 'Resolution'. 'Quality' will be how pixelated it is. Is it a bit scrappy, and a bit yucky looking? 'Medium' will still look fine, 'Low' will look gross, never use 'Low'. 'Medium' will be fine, 'High' will be pretty amazing and maximum. You won't see the difference between these two, I promise.
We're going to go for 'High Res' one, 'Maximum'. It's going to look as good as it can be, but the file size is going to be quite big. And then, 'Resolution', here the lowest is '72', and the highest you want to go to is '300'. Anything past this, this thing is going to be absolutely big, like meters wide. We'll leave that at '300'. 'Color Space' is 'RGB'. Always going to be 'RGB' for a JPEG. And leave this stuff at the bottom. Let's click 'Export'.
Nothing really happens, you got to go and find that folder, and there's my 'High Res', he's 1.4MB, pretty big. But, we look at the quality, pretty awesome, beautiful. Say I'm sending it out, and its going to go up to a website, and I know that 1.4MB is far too big for our website or emailing even, its pretty big. So we're going to go to 'Export', and we're going to say make something really small. I'm going to give it a name, I'm going to call it 'Low Res'. I'm going to go through, and say 'Maximum'. I'm going to put it down to 'High'. This is the lowest you ever want to go, '72' at 'Medium'. Click 'Export'.
You'll notice that the 'High Res' version-- I'll make this a bit bigger. Probably, make it even bigger. So, '1.4' is the 'High Res'. See this one here, 'Kilobytes', that is '0.04'. Set at '1.4', so its tiny compared to it. We'll look at the quality. It's smaller, the quality, its fine its not going to win the Quality Award, but this one here is really big, a really big file size. So, probably somewhere in the middle.
Just find yours, go to '150 dpi', go to 'Maximum', and see what the size is. Another thing you might find is that, if you don't have any images say it's just block colors your file size is going to be a lot smaller because it doesn't have to deal with all these colors. If you've got hundreds of images it's going to be even bigger than 1.4.
So that my friends, is how to save a JPEG from InDesign. Let's get on to the next video.