Opening a PDF in Photoshop and file gets distorted

[Berkeley Stat House]

Opening any PDF file bigger than 106.666" wide or tall Photoshop automatically squishes the file back to 106.666". A work around is creating a PSD file at the same size as your PDF and then placing the PDF within. Comes in at 100% no issues. 

My question is why is there a size limit when opening a PDF in PSD? Should Photoshop not issue a warning if it is going to create a distorted file?

[LAMY2017]

While we ponder, BSH, note that as far (not very) as I understand, one can't save as PDF. "Photoshop PDF." Here is one site's discussion:

https://8designers.com/blog/is-photoshop-pdf-the-same-as-pdf

[Stephen Marsh]

Photoshop rasterises generic PDF input. There is a 30,000 px 32,000 px limit, otherwise, distortion occurs.

(edited)

[Berkeley Stat House]

I wish two things, well, three really. If there is a 30,000 px limit Photoshop should either (1) not open the file or (2) provide a warning that distortion will occur. (3) not have a limit on opening files sizes because Photoshop allows creation of new file bigger than 30,000.

[BrettN]

Photoshop has a pixel limit of 300k, not 30k. Not sure why you'd run into an issue with 107" documents unless the dpi results in a higher pixel count than Photoshop will work with.

I'm not able to reproduce on my end.  I created a PDF that is 110" wide and was able to place it into a document which was 115" wide and it came in without issue. I used a DPI of 300. 

Can you share your PDF so I can test on my end? 

[Stephen Marsh]

Photoshop has a pixel limit of 300k, not 30k.

By BrettN

@BrettN – thanks for joining the discussion.

Yes, however, I was basing my comments on where this issue was previously reported when rasterizing a PDF file and it was determined that anything over 30K 32K pixels in width or height resulted in distortion.

I'll see if I can find the old topics where this came up.

Rasterizing a PDF at a width or height that is greater than 30K and placing a PDF into an open file larger than 30K on the width or height may invoke different processing. Or perhaps this is just something that was fixed in later versions and is just a coincidence that 30K and 300K pixel dimensions were historically important in Photoshop.

(edited)

[Stephen Marsh]

@BrettN 

I may have incorrectly remembered 30K vs. 32K for rasterising:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/pdf-import-in-photoshop/m-p/12931261

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/opening-a-large-pdf-in-photoshop-gets...

For saving, it may be 30K for Photoshop PDF which incorrectly stuck in my mind:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/quot-save-as-pdf-quot-size-limitation...

[BrettN]

Thanks for these links. The issue is pretty clear from that first post: When using the Import PDF dialog, the Image Size Width and Height have a maximum value of 32000 pixels. 

This value would, of course, be the product of the pdf document dimensions and the Resolution. The default Resolution is 300 with Inches as the measure. Which means with 106.666" you would end up at 32000 pixels. To get higher dimensions you have to reduce the resolution.

The distortion would seem to occur because the Import PDF dialog allows dimensions to change non-proportionally. And when one dimension maxes out when increasing size, the other one can continue to change independently.  If both dimensions are maximized by the size change, you would end up with a distored, square document.

My team doesn't work on this part of Photoshop, so there is plenty I don't know, but my guess is this dialog is extremely old, which is why the pixel limit is so low compared to what Photoshop is capable of. When I was attempting to replicate the issue, I was just placing the PDF directly into a new document sized to what I wanted to work with. This workflow does not run into this same sort of issue, so it is a good workaround. I'll reach out to the team responsible, though, and see what more we can learn.