Graphic Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Graphic Design professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have created a 1-page flyer in Photoshop at 72dpi as we are not printing this.
I finished the artwork and im needing to save it to PDF, but whenever i do so the pdf version is never as good a quality as the png version or jpg version that i have saved.
The attached front image is the PNG (jpg looks the same) but when i save to PDF, it results in the image blowing up in size.
There should be a dialog box when saving your PDF from Photoshop. See the 'Adobe PDF Preset' dropdown at the very top of this dialog. Try exporting via different presets and see which one works better. The 'High Quality Print' or 'Press Quality' should give you the best results.
Also look into the 'Compression' tab and try turning off some of those settings.
Keeping the original document as a psd is important to maintain as much quality as possible and always can return to the higher quality state in needed to export again. When exporting out as a png, jpeg or pdf here are some things you should keep in mind. PDFs save a lot of information that images don’t like font types and vector shapes. You can change the jpeg compression for the pdf document while exporting. I have had issues where photoshop didn’t have the pdf control needed. This is where adobe acrobat shines. It’s a very powerful tool you can use to really slim out PDFs file sizes.
So, the problem is that you think dpi is a fixed size. It is not.
If you screencap something, it has fixed pixel dimension, but the "72 ppi for a screengrab" is sort of a hack: this is obvious when you consider that the "i" in ppi means "inches" and that there are 1080p 13 inch monitors and 1080p 50 inch monitors. Exact same pixel dimensions, different physical size.
For a PDF, though, the program is primarily aimed at physical printouts, so there is an specified physical size to reckon with, and the typical rule of thumb is going to be 300dpi/ppi (printed/downsampled; note that dpi and ppi are different but similar enough for informal conversation).
A 1920 x 1080 screencap unresampled (unaltered) is only suitable for about 6.5 x 3.5 inches. If you drop it full-size onto a letter-sized paper, it must be upsampled (or worse: stretched), and this results in a quality loss. This is the resizing that @billy Kerr mentions.
Aside from this, zooming any image on a screen is going to result in some loss of quality, and your pdf zoom level is not going to be faithful to the printed version. The 100% screencap is native resolution, the PDF is simulated, and often the 100% page size does not align with a physical ruler anyway.
So the short answer is: set up your PDF print size to be exactly px-width/300 by pix-height/300 inches and your images will not be resized or resampled.
Further: ppi is a flag set in the headers and is really only a recommendation. Not all image file formats even support the ppi flag. Only the pixels in are actual image data.
Do a deep-dive on ppi on this stackexchange and you will find more tangential discussion about dpi/ppi. Look especially for the term "effective resolution."
It's because you are enlarging the image when you open the PDF in the viewer. The image only has a finite number of pixels, and when you increase the size it will look blurry.
You'd need to view it at the same size as the original to get the same quality. The issue is the size of the viewer/screen display, not the output of the PDF being changed to lower quality.
To put it bluntly, 72 dpi is not good enough quality if the PDF is to be opened full size on a large high resolution computer monitor. Increase the DPI to something like 120dpi instead (assuming the image is good enough resolution to begin with). You should see a marked improvement. If the file size is too big, change the compression settings when exporting as PDF.
So this is def more than a hack than i wanted to be in order to get the same results but turns out by changing my from 72dpi to 110dpi it got the pdf closer to the result i wanted
One solution might be to not save as PDF directly from Photoshop and instead just save as a .PNG, .Tiff or .jpg, then use Acrobat to convert the image file to PDF. That might preserve the appearance better.
I had the same issue and just figured it out. Make sure that when you are creating a new document, that it's set to 16 bit and not 8 bit.
I had this issue. This was my fix: I went to Edit -> Convert to Profile. I made sure that "Destination Space" was "Working CMYK-US Web Coated (swop) v2. Made sure that "Intent" was Relative Colorimatic (If you choose absolute colorimatic, you'll see a hazy version. That is what my pdf was looking like before I changed this setting). Click ok. Save as Photoshop PDF. Choose "Press Quality". I didn't mess with any other settings. Clicked Save and it looked perfect. Hope this helps someone. Good luck!
