Direct Photoshop Editing of Embedded PDF Images

I understand that Acrobat is Adobe’s dedicated PDF editor. However, Acrobat lacks many of the advanced vector editing tools that are often required in professional print production, so PDFs frequently need to be opened in Illustrator.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that Illustrator already does almost everything required. It correctly recognizes raster images inside the PDF, displays them, allows them to be selected, transformed, cropped, replaced, and managed through the Links panel.

The only missing step is the ability to send the selected image to Photoshop, edit it, save it, and have it update back in the document—exactly the workflow Acrobat already provides.

From a user’s perspective, this feels like a gap in an otherwise complete workflow rather than a missing capability. The applications already communicate with each other, and the image object is already identified correctly. It seems that only the final handoff to Photoshop is missing.

For professional prepress users, this would remove unnecessary switching between Illustrator and Acrobat and make PDF editing much more efficient.

I’m honestly surprised this workflow still isn’t available in 2026, because it feels like a natural extension of functionality that Adobe’s applications already provide.

Thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately, this does not work in my case.

I am not working with the original AI document. I am working with a PDF file opened directly in Illustrator, which is a very common workflow in print production.

I am attaching a screenshot of the document. Due to copyright restrictions, I had to cover the client’s content with white rectangles.

In the screenshot you can see that:

• the image object is selected,
• Illustrator clearly recognizes it as an Image object,
• the object appears in the Links panel,
• however, the Edit Original button is disabled (greyed out).

This means there is currently no way to open the selected raster image in Photoshop directly from Illustrator, even though Acrobat Pro can perform exactly this operation on the same PDF.

My question is therefore not about AI documents. It is specifically about PDFs opened in Illustrator.

Why can Acrobat open and edit a raster image embedded in a PDF through Photoshop, while Illustrator cannot?

Thank you.