Saving a photoshop document as a .pdf results in blurry / pixelated images

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I am using Photoshop CS2 to design a leaflet which is intended for distribution by email as a .pdf. My document is 72 dpi, which i believe is a suitable default for non-printing use.

There is one image in the document, a logo, and this is always appearing pixelated in Acrobat reader when i save the doc as .pdf. It looks fine in Photoshop. I have tried just about every option and combination of "Save As" options, nothing makes any difference.

I have tried both tiff and jpg versions of the image, to no avail. I also notice that if i choose no compression when Saving As, the resulting file size is gigantic – 10+ megs, even though the image is only 10k! And the image STILL is pixelated.

Any suggestions?

Thanks Richard.

Best Answer

I realize this question is a few years old but thought I'd offer a possible solution for anyone else having this issue. It isn't perfect but it produced much better results than anything else I've tried so far.

Note: this is assuming you're working off of a 72ppi Photoshop document (I'm using CS5).

  1. First ensure you have a PDF printer installed.

  2. Then in Photoshop go to File > Print and select the aforementioned printer.

  3. Click "Print Settings..." and select "High Quality Print" from the default settings box. (Or click "Edit" to the right and make sure your image quality is set to max).

  4. Still in the print settings dialog, go down to "Adobe PDF Page Size:" and click "Add.."

  5. Name your new paper size "doc" (or whatever you want really).

  6. Then for the size divide your document width by 109 (ppi) and your height by 109 (again ppi) and enter the resulting values in their respective locations (making sure inches is selected).

  7. Click "Add/modify" to close the dialog. Make sure your new paper size is selected from the "Adobe PDF Page Size" dropdown and hit "OK."

  8. In the "Scaled Print Size" box area change the scale to 66% (which should make the print resolution read 109 PPI).

  9. Click "Print", save your document and hopefully your PDF looks much better!

As a side note, you could try using 110ppi instead, calculating your size and changing the scale to 65% to match. But from my experience, for whatever reason, 109 worked better.

If you're wondering how this helps, Adobe Reader/Acrobat tend to display PDF's at 110ppi by default, so by creating the PDF to reflect this (yes, it's 1ppi off) it looks 100% at 100%.

Again, this is what worked for me, hopefully you have the same luck.

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