I’m working closely with a digital artist, who is creating images specifically for inclusion in a book I am publishing on CreateSpace.
Their standards (for images) suggest an absolute minimum of 200 DPI, and recommend 300 DPI. The artist has created multiple images for me, and assures me that they are at least 300 DPI in both TIF and JPEG formats.
When I insert them into Scrivener and then export the entire book as a PDF for upload to CreateSpace, their Interior Reviewer flags nearly every image as far below 200 DPI. Most are showing up as 108 DPI, and one of them 151 DPI, regardless of what I do in Scrivener; regardless of TIF or JPEG source.
I have no tools here to analyze PDF’s, but I assume that either Scrivener or the upload process is compressing the images somewhere along the line. That might not be the case, but knowing what I know about vector graphics (they are virtually unlimited DPI until exported into a particular format), it makes me wonder if there is another conversion/optimization process going on that isn’t apparent to me.
I followed the suggestion to link to external images, but the PDF output didn’t change. Somewhere along the line, higher DPI images get optimized… so the upload to CreateSpace complains.
I experimented with hand-drawing one of the diagrams, but I only increased the resulting DPI by a few percentage points.
Back to the drawing board with the artist… who is as frustrated as I am at this point. But at least we have a clue how to increase the level of detail in the images.
Curious. Expect one of the mods or a fellow Windows might be able to help.
Have you tried outputting to another format (checking the images) and then creating a PDF from that file? I know you shouldn’t gave to go through a two-step process, but it might help to identify where the problem stems from. Or even creating a basic Word file with a single image—outside of Scrivener—and testing that with the CreateSpace uploaded tool to see if it is happy with the image specs in their purest state?