A very good Wednesday to you all. 

I hope you are all starting to enjoy the beautiful Spring weather in your area. (If you had it for a while then fantastic. We are just starting to get some great weather here in New England.)

Today I want to discuss something that is often neglected and can be very frustrating for your Professor’s and classmates alike. That is, NOT reducing the size of your PDF files. When you upload your photographs for review it can become quite large and especially if you start adding additional files you land up having files in excess of 100MB.

For those students that have slower internet speeds, this just means we don’t download and critique your work. We just do not have the time to sit around and wait for large files to download. So how can you reduce the files, but at the same time make sure you have great detail and clarity in all your photographs?

Well it is very simple. Export your 300ppi, yes I know they sometimes want 150ppi or 72ppi because of the size, but to get around poor resolution export everything at 300ppi. (To do this in Lightroom I will discuss this in a later blog.) Once you have exported your contact sheets or final images for review you will then combine them into a PDF using Acrobat Pro version. The other versions do not have this option. There is a newer version for Acrobat on the market and because I am using Adobe Creative Cloud, that is the version I will discuss here.The principle and method is exactly the same for all the other versions as well.

In the following example I combined a contact sheet and nine images that I needed for my Creative Concepts course. I landed up with 15 files in the document which included my creative proposal, 9 final photographs for review and my contact sheets.  The final PDF size was just over 75MB.

I uploaded full resolution files for the detail and I had a 6 page Word document as well as my 4 contact sheets included. As you can see that is a very large file. So how do we reduce this file size. It is very simple. Under the tools menu in Acrobat, the location has changed for Acrobat CC, it is located on the left in Acrobat CC and on the right hand side in all the other versions. Click on the tools menu and select OPTIMIZE PDF.

Once you do this you then select the reduce file option on the menu bar.

In older version it says reduce file size in the right hand column. Click on the Reduce File Size option. Follow the instructions for saving and renaming your file. Acrobat will process all your photographs and files and make it easier for viewing on a computer screen.

If you check your file properties now you can see the change in file size. I have managed to reduce my file from 75MB down to 4.14MB

This makes it so much easier to upload to the class discussion area and I can vouch for it, your classmates will really appreciate the smaller file size.

I hope you found this tutorial useful. It makes such a difference when you are working late and that deadline is looming. Everybody appreciates it and you do not lose any detail from your photographs.

I am always willing to help so if you need additional help please send me an email or leave a message on the site blog. Where are here to help you.

If you have any suggestions for things you would like to see on the blog then also drop us a note and we will see about putting it into the roster of topics to discuss. As always I look forward to hearing from you and wish you all a great week with your assignments.

Denzil

Wednesday Ambassador.