I posted this to another Photoshop NG earlier this week. I am in the process of writing a procedures manual for some documentation folks and this question comes up a lot. It used to be very simple, but, suddenly in Office XP and now 2003, it has turned into
a gauntlet. I figured it had to be my fault…..so I called the source.
I spent a healthy chunk of time on the phone with a very polite Microsoft support tech last Friday– and the answer is– Microsoft is intentionally and knowingly making it difficult to extract and edit an image embedded in Word and have it look anything like decent.
It isn’t a mistake or a bug, they know it’s a PITA and they don’t (bleep)ing care.
This only applies if you have a version later than Office 2K and, yes, it does still apply to the newest Office 2003. I made them check.
They have disabled "edit picture" on purpose, and every workaround suggested by their tech support produces posterized, over-compressed images that are basically worthless.
Without their help, I did come up with three scenarios that actually produce better quality images than anything they mentioned. (but still not as good as
I might like) Two of the three require something other than Office and an image editor be installed on your system.
The first, if you have PowerPoint installed, is to copy the image to the clipboard and paste it into a Power Point slide, then save the PowerPoint slide as a jpg. That file can then be edited in a decent image editor normally.
Of all the three options, this produces the best results with the least pain, and
it doesn’t assume you have a bunch of additional apps installed. This is the one
I’d recommend to someone who is not a graphics pro and may not have Acrobat or another distiller installed.
The second, if do you have Acrobat or another PDF utility on your computer, is
to produce a PDF file from the Word document, and edit that document in PS You lose some quality, but it is infinitely better than anything MS had to offer me. This is the standard prepress solution.
The third requires you to have a screen capture utility. It is more "brute force" but seems to work well for embedded screen captures of dialog boxes and other diagrams Increase your screen resolution as high as it will go. Open the document in Word. Zoom in as far as you can and keep the entire image on screen. Capture the screen. Save that file . Restore your previous display settings. Open the file in PS and edit it there. By changing the screen resolution, you can take a 400×400 image and boost
it up to 2 or three times that– then when you resize down, some of the "crispness" comes back. This is really dumb, and my least favorite of the three,
but may be worth exploring if all else fails.
Hope this helps.
"Ki Suk Hahn" wrote in message
I have a Word file that has an embedded graphic. When I resize the the graphic it "does not lose resolution" (no pixelation, up to a certain
point)
I tried extracting that graphic by (in Word) select-Copy then in Photoshop File-New-OK-Paste. The graphic looks much worse than the original. I
don’t
know how to extract the original graphic to a file (of whatever format it was).
I ended up resizing the graphic in Word, printing to PDF, then save to
TIF,
which seems silly.
Anyone has some ideas?
KSH
