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Hello,
I’m trying to convert a multi-page PDF to individual GIF files, one per page, in Photoshop. Sounds pretty easy, but alas…
I have Photoshop 6.0 running on an eight-year-old desktop running Windows XP with 512MB of RAM, and I have Photoshop CS3 running on a four-year-old laptop running Windows XP with 1GB of RAM. (Photoshop 6.0 is faster. Why did I pay $1,000 again?)
That being said, that’s not really the problem. There are two main problems with CS3 and they’ve been driving me slightly nuts.
In Photoshop 6.0, there is a command under File -> Automate that lets you convert a multi-page PDF file to PSD files using a simple dialog box. It’s a quick and efficient process that I used to use all the time. In Photoshop CS3, this dialog has been deprecated apparently in favor of the more powerful File -> Open dialog box for PDFs. Unfortunately, this dialog is unbelievably slow on multi-page PDFs–especially PDFs with several hundred pages, as it attempts to draw thumbnails for each page. Furthermore, even once the thumbnails are stored in memory, there’s no way to convert the entire file to another format one page at a time in the manner that Photoshop 6.0 allows. You have to open all of the pages at once and then you can write a script to save them, but if my PDF happens to be 352 pages long, that means 352 simultaneously open windows. The swap file can’t handle it.
This brings me to my second point. Even if you somehow are able to get all of the PDF pages converted to individual PSD files (perhaps by using a handy eight-year-old desktop on the same network with an older version of Photoshop, ahem), then trying to use an Action to automate the process of saving all of those PSD files as GIF images is incredibly painful in Photoshop in CS3. In Photoshop 6.0 it works perfectly, but CS3 has an issue with giving back the swap space after each successive image is opened. In other words, I can only open (and then close) a certain number of pages in sequence before I run out of hard disk space because Photoshop’s swap file never gets smaller–it only grows with each new file that’s opened. This seems to be just an unbelievably poor implementation of basic memory management techniques, and if it’s some default setting that I don’t know about, then there are serious UI issues with this release because no one would actually want their software to work like that, always eating up memory.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to solve these problems in Photoshop CS3, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope you’re listening, Adobe…
Aaron
I’m trying to convert a multi-page PDF to individual GIF files, one per page, in Photoshop. Sounds pretty easy, but alas…
I have Photoshop 6.0 running on an eight-year-old desktop running Windows XP with 512MB of RAM, and I have Photoshop CS3 running on a four-year-old laptop running Windows XP with 1GB of RAM. (Photoshop 6.0 is faster. Why did I pay $1,000 again?)
That being said, that’s not really the problem. There are two main problems with CS3 and they’ve been driving me slightly nuts.
In Photoshop 6.0, there is a command under File -> Automate that lets you convert a multi-page PDF file to PSD files using a simple dialog box. It’s a quick and efficient process that I used to use all the time. In Photoshop CS3, this dialog has been deprecated apparently in favor of the more powerful File -> Open dialog box for PDFs. Unfortunately, this dialog is unbelievably slow on multi-page PDFs–especially PDFs with several hundred pages, as it attempts to draw thumbnails for each page. Furthermore, even once the thumbnails are stored in memory, there’s no way to convert the entire file to another format one page at a time in the manner that Photoshop 6.0 allows. You have to open all of the pages at once and then you can write a script to save them, but if my PDF happens to be 352 pages long, that means 352 simultaneously open windows. The swap file can’t handle it.
This brings me to my second point. Even if you somehow are able to get all of the PDF pages converted to individual PSD files (perhaps by using a handy eight-year-old desktop on the same network with an older version of Photoshop, ahem), then trying to use an Action to automate the process of saving all of those PSD files as GIF images is incredibly painful in Photoshop in CS3. In Photoshop 6.0 it works perfectly, but CS3 has an issue with giving back the swap space after each successive image is opened. In other words, I can only open (and then close) a certain number of pages in sequence before I run out of hard disk space because Photoshop’s swap file never gets smaller–it only grows with each new file that’s opened. This seems to be just an unbelievably poor implementation of basic memory management techniques, and if it’s some default setting that I don’t know about, then there are serious UI issues with this release because no one would actually want their software to work like that, always eating up memory.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to solve these problems in Photoshop CS3, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope you’re listening, Adobe…
Aaron
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