Adobe Indesign/Photoshop question or where else can I ask this?
Asked by
kevbo (
25672)
January 7th, 2016
from iPhone
I had a ridiculous problem today with a stock image that I opened in Photoshop to resize and convert from RGB to CMYK. After saving the file, I tried placing in my Indesign document, but the image would just show up as a “thumbprint,” and by that I mean: Imagine pressing your thumb to a photo. Now imagine everywhere your thumb is not touching doesn’t even appear in the image frame or in the image’s direct selection box. So I had no image, i.e. It was totally blank/transparent, except a small smudge, and the only path or whatever was around the shape of the smudge.
After trying a hundred different things, what worked was opening the image in Photoshop, exporting the image as a JPEG or PNG (I tried both), opening the exported version in Photoshop, and then converting and resizing. This last saved version would place in Indesign, but afterwards would not reopen in Photoshop! (It did open in Illustrator.) It was fucking bananas.
I’ll add that everything looked normal until I placed the image. I even had a normal looking loaded cursor with the image thumbnail in Indesign when I undid the place.
If the tide pool doesn’t have the answer, where else is good to ask?
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6 Answers
Does the image have any alpha channels? If so, remove them.
This can be done in the photoshop channels window.
Or could you have accidentally saved it as a different format with the incorrect extension in the file name?
I’ll have a look at that when I get back to my desk. Thanks for the suggestion. It was a straight download (twice) from istockphoto.com and no other images gave me this problem.
If it came to that—I would take a screenshot and crop. For me, that usually takes care of any hidden coding on the image.
That would work, except it’s for print so I need 300 dpi. Should have mentioned that in the details. Sorry.
I’ve done this trick before with varying levels of success— if the photo is not way too small then, I use command-+ to enlarge the desktop, do the screen shot, crop, save, then open in Photoshop. I’ll resize the photo to a really large size, like 25×30 inches using 150 dpi, save it, then resize again to a smaller size with 300 dpi.
Just FYI… I’m not a photo thief—I used to work for a publishing company that gave out athlete of the month awards and the award template had space for the athlete’s photo. If I couldn’t get the athlete to send me a good photo (happened often… they got busy)—I would use what I could find online. This “trick” doesn’t always work—but sometimes it does produce a printable result.
Ah, nice to know. Thanks!
I had a savvy tech guy look at the problem. I think he found it was either a clipping path that got introduced somehow or an alpha channel issue (as was mentioned above). He was able to fix it, but now I don’t remember how.
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