Save A .pdf..

Sometimes I’ll open a .pdf document in CS3 to make some changes to it and then save it as a .pdf with a new name. The problem I’m having is when I start with a .pdf document that is 308KB in size and open one page of that document in CS3 and then save the changed page as a .pdf, the new one page document is now 1.41MB in size.

I’ve played around with different settings in the Save As dialog box and I can get a smaller file but it’s not very sharp, not nearly as sharp as the smaller, original .pdf.

I used the following settings to get the 1.41MB file:
Adobe PDF Preset: [Press Quality](Modified)
Standard: None Compatibility: Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4) Options selected: Optimize for Fast Web Preview

If I choose [Smallest File Size]in the Adobe PDF Preset, the resulting .pdf is smaller, but not as sharp as the original .pdf.

Are there better selections when Saving to preserve both the size and sharpness of the original .pdf document?

JD wrote:

Sometimes I’ll open a .pdf document in CS3 to make some changes to it and then save it as a .pdf with a new name. The problem I’m having is when I start with a .pdf document that is 308KB in size and open one page of that document in CS3 and then save the changed page as a .pdf, the new one page document is now 1.41MB in size.

I’ve played around with different settings in the Save As dialog box and I can get a smaller file but it’s not very sharp, not nearly as sharp as the smaller, original .pdf.

I used the following settings to get the 1.41MB file:
Adobe PDF Preset: [Press Quality](Modified)
Standard: None Compatibility: Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4) Options selected: Optimize for Fast Web Preview

If I choose [Smallest File Size]in the Adobe PDF Preset, the resulting .pdf is smaller, but not as sharp as the original .pdf.

Are there better selections when Saving to preserve both the size and sharpness of the original .pdf document?

Does the original PDF document contain text and/or vector graphics? If so, that may be your problem. Photoshop will render text and vector graphics to pixels, making the file size bigger and the quality worse.

Johan W. Elzenga wrote:

JD wrote:

Sometimes I’ll open a .pdf document in CS3 to make some changes to it and then save it as a .pdf with a new name. The problem I’m having is when I start with a .pdf document that is 308KB in size and open one page of that document in CS3 and then save the changed page as a .pdf, the new one page document is now 1.41MB in size.

I’ve played around with different settings in the Save As dialog box and I can get a smaller file but it’s not very sharp, not nearly as sharp as the smaller, original .pdf.

I used the following settings to get the 1.41MB file:
Adobe PDF Preset: [Press Quality](Modified)
Standard: None Compatibility: Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4) Options selected: Optimize for Fast Web Preview

If I choose [Smallest File Size]in the Adobe PDF Preset, the resulting .pdf is smaller, but not as sharp as the original .pdf.

Are there better selections when Saving to preserve both the size and sharpness of the original .pdf document?

Does the original PDF document contain text and/or vector graphics? If so, that may be your problem. Photoshop will render text and vector graphics to pixels, making the file size bigger and the quality worse.

Yes, the original .pdf is mostly text.

I’ve been playing around with the compression and I’ll be able to find a happy medium between quality and size but now I understand why I’ll never get the quality of the original .pdf. Thanks!

JD wrote:

Johan W. Elzenga wrote:

JD wrote:

Sometimes I’ll open a .pdf document in CS3 to make some changes to it and then save it as a .pdf with a new name. The problem I’m having is when I start with a .pdf document that is 308KB in size and open one page of that document in CS3 and then save the changed page as a .pdf, the new one page document is now 1.41MB in size.

I’ve played around with different settings in the Save As dialog box and
I can get a smaller file but it’s not very sharp, not nearly as sharp as
the smaller, original .pdf.

I used the following settings to get the 1.41MB file:
Adobe PDF Preset: [Press Quality](Modified)
Standard: None Compatibility: Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4)
Options selected: Optimize for Fast Web Preview

If I choose [Smallest File Size]in the Adobe PDF Preset, the resulting .pdf is smaller, but not as sharp as the original .pdf.

Are there better selections when Saving to preserve both the size and sharpness of the original .pdf document?

Does the original PDF document contain text and/or vector graphics? If so, that may be your problem. Photoshop will render text and vector graphics to pixels, making the file size bigger and the quality worse.

Yes, the original .pdf is mostly text.

I’ve been playing around with the compression and I’ll be able to find a happy medium between quality and size but now I understand why I’ll never get the quality of the original .pdf. Thanks!

To keep the PDF small, open the page you are editing in Illustrator, rather than Photoshop. If you just ‘save’, all the other pages of the PDF will be unaffected by your change; however, if you ‘save as’ I believe it will only save the one page you opened.

Because Illustrator is NOT rasterizing the text, the file size should be almost as small as the original.