High Quality print to file - how?

[slickHenry]

I'm in the process of creating a website from a book with multiple illustrations. The pages are in QuarkXpress with DCS 2.0 linked images, I have to recreate each image for the web. The reason I don't go back to the original images is that each image has very specific text call-outs and there are over 12,000 of them!

Q1: how do I 'export as eps' or 'print to file' (ps) with the highest quality images? My attempts so far have left the images looking rough compared to the originals. I have re-associated the high-res dcs' files, is there a problem with scaling or rasterizing when opening in illustrator/photoshop or do I need a specific post script printer?

Q2: if I can get the Q1 to work how do I export multiple pages from one Quark doc?

finally - I'm not too familiar with Quark.

 

[blueark]

I'm not really sure why you need "the highest quality images" for the web...surely you don't need them to be anywhere near print resolution?

Anyway, one thing I would do is convert all the DCS files to something more managable. DCS is really designed for separating to print, so write an action in Photoshop to convert them all to, say, standard EPS files. You could also change the color mode and image size at this point if you like. Now when you update the images in Quark, saving a page as an EPS should give you acceptable results. Trouble is, of course, that Quark can only save one page at a time...

Consider other methods too. Quark 5 has some web export options, and you could also get your hands on Acrobat and create one big PDF file.

Hope this helps!

 

[slickHenry]

thanks blueark - the images are hand drawn watercolors hence the desire to start with higher res, so that I can control the amount of degradation when I apply any compression (some of it at least)

I did try to use a photoshop action to flatten the images but they are named in such a way as to make this particularly tricky - image, image.c, image.m, image.y, image.k - in the same directory, when I do the action photoshop doesn't distinguish between the 4 images (anything after the period being the the extension) and writes over the previous images.

Q: if I manage to flatten the images can I re-associate the eps files in place of the DCS files without having place or scale them?

thanks again.

 

[blueark]

Reassociating them should be easy. DCS files are really just a variation of EPS files, so if you make one composite file out of the image and keep the file name (the one without the .c .m .y .k extensions), you can just update them in Quark. You might want to turn 'Auto-Picture Import' to On (in preferences) and reopen the file seeing as there are so many of them.

I take your point about the actions, though. Never thought about photoshop opening ALL the separations. If you have the time and disk space, it should still work though (I think!). Just dump all the files with the extensions afterwards. I'm sure there's a better way though...I'll brush up on my actions and see if I can find something more practical!

Just so you know, a DCS file (usually) contains 5 different files: one grayscale file for each separation and one lower resolution composite/preview file, which is the one Quark uses. When you flatten it, the composite file now contains all the image information, and you can discard the other four files. Why Photoshop doesn't do this automatically is beyond me though...

Hope this helps!