I very often run into problems when I’m trying to send a design comp to a client to preview, and the pdf is too large. Since designers and advertisers commonly work with large graphics files, this becomes an issue when you want your pdf to have a nice appearance but you need to email it to your client. High compression does the trick on the file size, but the images end up pixellated and the quality effect is lost.
Apple offers small business quick tips on their website, including one about an easy way to make a pdf file size smaller using a ColorSync setting – something many people probably don’t mess with on a regular basis.
I gave it a try on a file that has been giving me problems recently. The original, uncompressed pdf was 200 mb and the new one using the ColorSync tip was only 1 mb. The highly compressed export that I used before was 1.5 mb. Here is a side-by-side comparison of image quality in the three different files, with the uncompressed file on the left, the ColorSync file in the middle and the compressed file on the right:
There is a clear difference between the uncompressed file and the others, but the ColorSync compression has a much nicer visual presentation than the compressed file.
In addition to this handy tip, there are many more offered on this page, in an easy-to-access location and covering many topics to make life a little easier using a Mac. It’s worth a browse for any designer who would like to brush up on their Mac skills and hopefully improve productivity.
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