images and PDFs

[Troy McGraw]

I have created a PDF and imported an image created in Photoshop, but the image appears in poor quality no matter what the viewing percentage is set at in Adobe Reader. The original image is fine and it prints correctly from the PDF - just the viewing is the problem. Can anyone offer suggestions?

[YrbkMgr]

I'm not sure what you're trying to do. How are you importing the image into Acrobat?

Maybe it's best to walk through what you want to do, and exactly how you are doing it - are you distilling? What application created the PDF in the first place, etc.

Peace,
Tony

[Eric Purkalitis]

I'd take a peek in the acrobat forum. This is an Adobe website. My guess is that the image is getting downsampled somehow.

Are you using save as photoshop pdf? It uses jpg, might not be as sharp. If your printing to acrobat, you might have setting set to screen or something. You might have a hi-rez image at 300dpi getting bumped down to 72dpi in the distilling process.

[Thee_DarkOverLord]

Are you viewing the PDF above 100%, there are also a lot of compression options where you may be creating very lo res jpegs of your images.

[Troy McGraw]

Hello All,

Sorry I wasn't specific...my bad. I actually created a MS Word doc with the image imported into that and then created the PDF with distiller. Hope this helps identify the problem better.

Thanks again.
Troy

[Troy McGraw]

I was thinking....does the image need to be vector based to appear correctly?

[YrbkMgr]

Troy,

You need to tweak your distiller settings so that you control the amount of downsampling of the image. It has a dramatic effect on file size, but then again, that's always the trade-off.

What you'll want to do is try an experiment on image quality by setting Distiller ridiculously high, regardless of file size, to see if that can result in the desired image quality, then tweak it down from there until you hit the "sweet spot" of file size/quality.

Also, keep in mind that while Acrobats rendering engine is pretty dern good, not all raster images are going to appear well at all mags. By zooming in, if it gets better, that's an indication of how the image is being redrawn in AA, not necessarily the image quality, although there are things you can do to "help".

Finally, vector will always appear crisper and is resizable, so you are always better off using vector graphics where possible. Some images don't lend themselves to that format obviously, but if you *can* get it vector, you'll be happier.

Peace,
Tony