Hi, I am a designer with artwork mostly made in Illustrator (some in Photoshop). What is the best way to create pdf presentations from these files? I organized my designs in Photoshop, made nice presentation pages and then used Acrobat to translate these into multipage pdfs. However, the file size is enormous (11MB)! Is there another way to do these presentation pages or alternatively making these already done pdfs smaller in size without loosing the quality?
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pdf presentation of Illustrator files
- Thread starter sa77
- Start date
...what PDF settings are you using in Photoshop?
...are you in RGB or CMYK?
...do the photoshop source files contain vector elements?
...creating PDF files from photoshop can lead to bloated PDF file sizes when that of a comparsion export from say indesign or illustrator to pdf with the same pdf settings...
...depends on a number of variables and how the photoshop files are structured as pdf from photoshop maintains vector information. Vector PDF files don't automatically mean smaller PDF files.
...also a higher version of PDF (from 1.4 to 1.7) doesn't always mean smaller files when preserving layers in PDF. Using PDF 1.3 format can give you smaller files even though they are flattened PDF files.
...in my experience I have produced smaller PDF files from photoshop by printing to postscript first and then distilling to PDF via acrobat distiller...same quality and settings for PDF 1.3 Acrobat 4 format as I would from a program export...
...Acrobat Pro offers further optimizations of pdf files under the "Advanced" menu > "PDF Optimizer"...
...settings here though will strip out links that you might want to keep, so you have to test your settings by process of elimination.
andrew
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...are you in RGB or CMYK?
...do the photoshop source files contain vector elements?
...creating PDF files from photoshop can lead to bloated PDF file sizes when that of a comparsion export from say indesign or illustrator to pdf with the same pdf settings...
...depends on a number of variables and how the photoshop files are structured as pdf from photoshop maintains vector information. Vector PDF files don't automatically mean smaller PDF files.
...also a higher version of PDF (from 1.4 to 1.7) doesn't always mean smaller files when preserving layers in PDF. Using PDF 1.3 format can give you smaller files even though they are flattened PDF files.
...in my experience I have produced smaller PDF files from photoshop by printing to postscript first and then distilling to PDF via acrobat distiller...same quality and settings for PDF 1.3 Acrobat 4 format as I would from a program export...
...Acrobat Pro offers further optimizations of pdf files under the "Advanced" menu > "PDF Optimizer"...
...settings here though will strip out links that you might want to keep, so you have to test your settings by process of elimination.
andrew
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- Thread starter
- #3
Tricky... I have flattened the files and tried to select settings that would make the files smaller but without major success. Saving the file as a jpeg and using that in Acrobat makes the pdf slightly smaller. My pdfs will be printed so the quality must be good but they will also be e-mailed so the size is important as well. Must keep on studying...
Thank you.
Thank you.
- Thread starter
- #4
...there are many variables involved with graphics, quite often you have to do two workflows, one for web and one for commercial printing as they both require quite different approaches.
...usually with printing to desktop devices your image resolutions for bitmaps need to target 150dpi to accomodate higher resolution devices. But commercially printed work requires around 260dpi to 350dpi.
...other than full color bitmaps your only other options are to maintain vector work as vector, and keeping fonts as fonts...for this type of work your better to build in indesign, quark or illustrator.
...depending on the artwork structure the other format option is to have elements as 1bit images (i.e. line art graphics) as these contain less information compared to greyscale images that could otherwise be 1bit images instead.
...if you were to structure your artwork inside indesign, quark or illustrator it's possible you could achieve smaller file sizes targeting image compression at 150dpi for desktop printers, keep in RGB colorspace and have placed 1bit images (at 600dpi to 1400dpi) instead of greyscale images where possible.
...when exporting to PDF from a layout application you need to ensure that the PDF settings are set to target a specified resolution (150dpi for bitmaps) and ensure that RGB colorspace is used to keep file sizes low as CMYK will create bigger files.
...from here you can then further optimize in Acrobat advanced options.
...unfortunatley there is no one size fits all approach, so if you find that after PDF optimization your file sizes don't get smaller then it's unlikely they will get smaller from that point forward.
...the only other compression within Acrobat Pro is to use JPEG2000 instead of the normal JPEG compression for bitmaps...
...it's very much experimentation, but generally preserving vector is the first thing to try, keeping in RGB, 150dpi for desktop printing, use 1bit images where possible...
...other than this you can only go to complete bitmap images for entire pages, but without testing both approaches you won't now which will priovide the smallest possible PDF pages.
andrew
============
============
...usually with printing to desktop devices your image resolutions for bitmaps need to target 150dpi to accomodate higher resolution devices. But commercially printed work requires around 260dpi to 350dpi.
...other than full color bitmaps your only other options are to maintain vector work as vector, and keeping fonts as fonts...for this type of work your better to build in indesign, quark or illustrator.
...depending on the artwork structure the other format option is to have elements as 1bit images (i.e. line art graphics) as these contain less information compared to greyscale images that could otherwise be 1bit images instead.
...if you were to structure your artwork inside indesign, quark or illustrator it's possible you could achieve smaller file sizes targeting image compression at 150dpi for desktop printers, keep in RGB colorspace and have placed 1bit images (at 600dpi to 1400dpi) instead of greyscale images where possible.
...when exporting to PDF from a layout application you need to ensure that the PDF settings are set to target a specified resolution (150dpi for bitmaps) and ensure that RGB colorspace is used to keep file sizes low as CMYK will create bigger files.
...from here you can then further optimize in Acrobat advanced options.
...unfortunatley there is no one size fits all approach, so if you find that after PDF optimization your file sizes don't get smaller then it's unlikely they will get smaller from that point forward.
...the only other compression within Acrobat Pro is to use JPEG2000 instead of the normal JPEG compression for bitmaps...
...it's very much experimentation, but generally preserving vector is the first thing to try, keeping in RGB, 150dpi for desktop printing, use 1bit images where possible...
...other than this you can only go to complete bitmap images for entire pages, but without testing both approaches you won't now which will priovide the smallest possible PDF pages.
andrew
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