An ability to control the assumed resolution for placed PNG files
Raster images brought into Illustrator always seem to appear at 72 ppi, and are scaled too large relative to an artboard with 300 ppi raster effects. There is no way to set images to appear at the desired resolution, instead requiring you to manually adjust their size with the transform tools.
A 300 pixel wide PNG appears on the artboard scaled 4.17 inches/105.8 mm wide. It's too big and blurry if you print it. You have to down-size it manually with the transform tools... awkward.
The desired behaviour is for raster images to appear scaled on the artboard at an appropriate size relative to their own resolution and the document raster effect settings.
A 300 pixel wide PNG should appear on a 300 ppi artboard at a scale of 1 inch/25.4 mm.
Mark Nicoll
shared this idea
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Jason commented
Illustrator follows the native dpi of a photo (72 DPI), thus all web and photos are placed at massive scales.
It's 2024, not 2001. There are many more pixels in common web images and photos. A standard iPhone 15PM photo, for example, imports at 56" tall. This is not helpful for ANYONE and requires either extra process in photoshop or adjustment in illustrator - which ALREADY doesn't have a useful tool for cropping or batch resizing.
Assuming we use standard paper-sized artboards, this current placement almost always requires additional work.
Issue: When you drop a normal web image or photo, it always imports as MANY TIMES the size of the artboard.Example: Photo taken with iPhone 15PM, imports as 56" tall (as the file taken is recognized as 56" tall at 72dpi).
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Mark, as far as I know, the Resolution value in the Document Raster Effect Settings dialog has no connection to the assumed resolution of placed images and does not influence it in any way. Illustrator has to assume a resolution for images which do not have any specified resolution within (since it’s an arbitrary value for PNGs to have).
One can specify a resolution for a PNG file, but since it’s a format originally designed for web, and a resolution is a 'density factor' basically, Ai just has to assume it... but true, we don’t have a way to influence it. Thus it’s not really a bug but a feature request.
Voted.
