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lennertd8938241
Participant
May 9, 2016
Question

Exporting to Tiff stretches the image but why?

  • May 9, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 6201 views

For a workflow situation we are exporting lots of PDFs to Tiff files for further processing. But with some of those PDFs the Tiff file get's stretched.

E.g. The original PDF is 420mm x 594mm. When I export to TIFF it turns into a 4878 x 3999 pixels (or 420 mm x 344,32mm) image. This is just an illustration of how it's get stretched. The same happens for other formats. And it also doesn't matter if I export to JPEG (see attached). Exactly the same result. These are all (initially) simple Indesign layouts: image with some text and logo. Does anybody have an idea what might go wrong?

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    2 replies

    c.pfaffenbichler
    Community Expert
    c.pfaffenbichlerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 28, 2020

    What is the Resolution setting (under »Settings« in the Export dialog)? 

    Have you tried a setting other than »Determine Automatically«? 

    K
    Keith301688251h0v
    Participant
    May 30, 2023

    No idea why but changing this from "Determine Automaticlly" to 600dpi stopped Acrobat from resizing my tiff, thanks!

      D
      defaultk901y1ok2uh8
      Participant
      September 3, 2023

      Been exporting to jpeg forever then all of a sudden this happened to me as well and was driving me insane. 
      Thanks for the workaround!

       

      Karl Heinz Kremer
      Community Expert
      Karl Heinz KremerCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      May 9, 2016

      Is this happening with all PDF documents, or just with one or a few coming from the same source?

      Do you see the same effect when exporting to other image formats?

      What application is showing the "stretched" image?

      I suspect that you are dealing with a case where the pixels in the source data are not square (a different resolution in x and y directions), and the PDF generating application stretches the image in the direction where the pixels are shorter to make the whole image appear correct again. This information can be encoded in the TIFF image, but without running some tests, I don't know if Adobe Acrobat actually does that when exporting TIFF images.

      L
      lennertd8938241Author
      Participant
      May 10, 2016

      This is happening to some of the PDF documents. I have about 30 InDesign documents with the same source of collection of images and when exporting to PDF they all look perfect. When I export to Tiff, Jpeg or PNG some of these get stretched.

      It doesn't matter if I open the files in Preview or Photoshop. They both look the same.

      Liked your theory but when I looked at the source image the pixels in it are square. And if it would have been in the source image then the text should not have been stretched, correct?

      P.S. And thanks for thinking with me.

      Karl Heinz Kremer
      Community Expert
      Karl Heinz KremerCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      May 10, 2016

      Let me first say that I might have misunderstood the question: You are talking about exporting PDF files as TIFF images, I understood exporting all images in a PDF. That changes things a bit. The following is still about my interpretation (I wrote this before I realized that I might be looking at this the wrong way):

      The text is part of the image (otherwise it would not be exported as part of the image), so it would stretch too.

      However, I just ran an experiment with an image with a pixel aspect ratio of 1:1.33 (100dpi and 133dpi), placed that into an ID document, adjusted the aspect ratio of the image so that it looked square again (it started out as a square image), exported to PDF, and then exported all images from that PDF, and I ended up with a square image with square pixels (233dpi in both directions).

      And now, that I may actually understand what you are doing, let's take a look at this from a different angle: Which version of Acrobat are you using, and on what operating system (your mention of Preview suggests that it's on a Mac, so which Mac OS version)?

      When you bring up Acrobat's Preferences and then go to the "Export from PDF" category, select your output format and then change the configuration settings one by one, do you see a difference in the image output?

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