Easily reduce size of bloated PDF

[_Cyndee_Meystel_]

A customer needed to send me a PDF for a job I'm doing. It was 14 mb. and
too big to email. I told her to use yousendit.com which she tried, but her
internet connection was not reliable and it kept timing out. I wanted to try
to get her to reduce the PDF (she did not create it) to get it under 10 mb.
She did not have Acrobat, but had ID. She tried placing it into ID and
exporting a new PDF -- still 14 mb. She printed to PDF (not Adobe's,
something else she had) -- still 14 mb.

Eventually she opened it on Photoshop where we found it was actually a
layered PSD. She flattened it and saved it as a highest quality JPG and it
got it down to 4 mb. which she emailed me.

Was there a better way to handle this? I realized afterwards that maybe
zipping the original PDF would have done the trick?

In fact in the end, we decided not to use the JPG but to have her put it
onto a CD which we would pick up (15 minute drive).

How would you have handled this?

--
Cyndee

[BobLevine · Accepted solution]

Photoshop PDFs do tend to be very large. Have it resaved without
Photoshop editing capability which should reduce the size dramatically.

Bob

[annas84289224]

Thanks so much for the advice! My file went from 46 to 4MB when I turned off that feature. Now I can send my sales PDF to my clients.

[Guest]

I don't think zipping the PDF would be much help. PDFs are pretty compact and from what I've seen the resultant zip is
around the same size as the PDF, and quite possibly inflated with the zip architecture making it bigger.

k

[Peter Spier]

The one big reason to leave it as a layered PDF would be if it has type, which would be rasterized when you flattened.

[_Cyndee_Meystel_]

Yes, it had type in it. And there was no way to reduce size other than
rasterizing and flattening in PS. We wound up putting it on a CD.

[BobLevine]

IIRC, it doesn't have to remain a layered PDF, though. If you save it
without Photoshop editing, the layers are flattened but the text remains
live.

Bob

[_Cyndee_Meystel_]

Thanks, good to know that for future reference.

[Matthew Michaels]

I was able to reduce a 25MB file to 148kb.  I had success flattening the layers AND using the SAVE AS for a PhotoShop PDF, but I removed/deselected the Photoshop PDF Preset option to PRESERVE PHOTOSHOP EDITING CAPABILITIES.  This removes all the extra Photoshop code from the file.  Remember to keep an original layered copy for future editing.

Just for clarity: Deselect the "Preserve Photoshop Editing Capabilities" option in the Photoshop PDF Preset dialogue box when saving as a Photoshop PDF to reduce the PDF file size.

[BobLevine]

I suggest using save a copy instead or at the very least saving as PSD first.

Bob

[Matthew Michaels]

Thanks Bob for adding that detail.  By checking the save "as a copy" the original layered file is kept untouched when "saving as" the new PDF file.

Matthew

[Aicx_Medina]

I tried to "save as" an 11MB pdf file, then unchecking the option "preserve photoshop editing capabilities", but it only went down to 10.6MB. And yes flattening will only rasterize text and make it unreadable when being read. So I ended up using an external source.

http://compress.smallpdf.com/

That link helped me bring down the 11MB file to 3MB quickly.

But, I still do hope there's away of doing it without the need to go online.

[Eugene Tyson]

Yes - but if you ever opened it again to make an edit and resaved it - the whole thing gets rasterised.

[Eugene Tyson]

Just realised how old this thread is...

Aicx Medina - you should create new discussions if you have specific queries.

[jaredmast]

I wasted a lot of time creating PDFs directly from Photoshop. When you uncheck "Save as Layers", this reduces the file size somewhat, but a 40 MB .psd file will still be a 20 MB .pdf file.

I JUST learned this trick and it makes saving your PSDs into PDFs faster and significantly smaller.

Save your Photoshop files as PNGs. This is very quick. Then, use Acrobat to combine each PNG into a PDF.

I took 70 MB across four Photoshop files, converted them to .PNGs individually, then combined them in Acrobat to get a 1 MB PDF file with four pages.

GENIUS.

[Willi Adelberger]

jonmaimon wrote:

I wasted a lot of time creating PDFs directly from Photoshop. When you uncheck "Save as Layers", this reduces the file size somewhat, but a 40 MB .psd file will still be a 20 MB .pdf file.

I JUST learned this trick and it makes saving your PSDs into PDFs faster and significantly smaller.

Save your Photoshop files as PNGs. This is very quick. Then, use Acrobat to combine each PNG into a PDF.

I took 70 MB across four Photoshop files, converted them to .PNGs individually, then combined them in Acrobat to get a 1 MB PDF file with four pages.

GENIUS.

No Genius, very stupid.

You way will destroy any text and vector content, will reduce any transparency to only alpha transparency, will allow only RGB color spaces, will make color profiles unreadable, will end with very poor quality. Not recommendable.

[Rae8]

This worked great! Thank you very much. For my needs it IS Genius!

[Erin_O_Malley]

The easiest way to do this (as I have always done) is to save your psd file as an eps and drag the eps into your acrobat distiller (should come with adobe acrobat in the suite). For example, it reduced my 50MB psd file to a 825KB pdf.

[enrico_limcaco]

I second this advice. Distiller is fantastic for compressing rasters independently of the vectors in the file, and additional dark magic that I can't readily explain, to get the file size down.

I just hand-processed a file by replacing raster layers of solid color with vector objects, to minimize the number of vector objects getting rasterized and compressed. Saved it as an EPS and dropped it onto the Distiller window. Yielded a 4.9 MB PDF instead of a 49 MB PDF.

[Willi Adelberger]

Leland Michaels wrote:

The easiest way to do this (as I have always done) is to save your psd file as an eps and drag the eps into your acrobat distiller (should come with adobe acrobat in the suite). For example, it reduced my 50MB psd file to a 825KB pdf.

and

morty_seinfeld wrote:

I second this advice. Distiller is fantastic for compressing rasters independently of the vectors in the file, and additional dark magic that I can't readily explain, to get the file size down.

I just hand-processed a file by replacing raster layers of solid color with vector objects, to minimize the number of vector objects getting rasterized and compressed. Saved it as an EPS and dropped it onto the Distiller window. Yielded a 4.9 MB PDF instead of a 49 MB PDF.

Don't do that!

Don't use postscript, never use EPS with InDesign or Photoshop or Illustrator as EPS is an archaic file type which does not support transparency. You end up in a changed output.

EPS is old and archaic and should not be used sind 15 Years now. Never make any PDF via Distiller as you loose to much quality. Other advices above (not all) are good, follow them but not this one.