High resolution pictures in Posters made with PowerPoint 2013

Question

I'm currently creating a poster (size A0) in PowerPoint 2013 and want it to be in the best quality possible. I used vector images where possible, but for some images I had to use raster graphics.

Now my problem is, that power point samples them down quite a lot and I see no way of preventing this. I just drag and drop the image on my poster, rescale it appropriately and then export the file as PDF. Ideally I would like the picture to be embedded in the original (full) resolution in the pdf, but if there is no way of doing it, I would also be ok with having it resampled with a sufficient high (say 300) dpi rate. How can I achieve that?

I already tried to change the DPI in the registry, which did not help. Also I noticed that the image already looks bad inside PowerPoint and that die file size of the .pptx is far to small, so there is already something going wrong during the import.

Answer 1

I don't think PowerPoint is capable of this. PowerPoint is made for creating on-screen presentations, not print-ready .pdf files.

You'll want to use InDesign, or export a .pdf version of your raster image from a raster application like Photoshop.

Answer 2

Powerpoint object model is not all that accurate. When i used to do big print preparation in the University I had to rebuild all PPT posters from scratch because what appeared on a straight line in PPT was actulally not. This meant text lines were all over the place.

So, my advice is to use either corel draw or illustrator, as those have comparable workflows to ppt. You could use InDesign but the learning curve due to program philosophy might be a problem.