Need Help Saving JPG as PDF

[Chuck Peterson]

I'm not great with Illustrator, I do most of my designing in Omega then save as. I'm re-designing a postcard for a customer. They sent me a jpg, about 2 megs, I think. When I set some type and add the jpg in Illustrator and save as PDF it turns into a huge file. I think about 40 megs, I can't recall right now. I can lower the the JPGs resolution some, but its still strange. Does anyone have a solution?

 

[shoresigns]

After you choose the filename and click the Save button, you get a box of Adobe PDF options. Go to the Compression section and change ZIP to JPEG and set the quality to High or Maximum.

 

[Chuck Peterson]

That helped. Thank you.

 

[Bobby H]

Illustrator's default is to not apply lossy compression to placed images since it is destructive to the quality of the image. Placing a JPEG image (which was already compressed when it was first encoded as a JPEG file) and re-compressing it when creating a PDF basically does the same thing as extra steps of generational loss when duping photographs or analog audio recordings. Depending on the compression setting the "generational loss" from re-compressing can get pretty severe.

I see this a lot from duplicate images in Google Image Search or searching for videos on YouTube. It's pretty easy to tell the difference from the original source images or videos and the "me too" duplicate posts from people stupidly copying and re-uploading the same thing vainly to get people to look at their page rather than the original source.

 

[shoresigns]

Depending on the compression setting the "generational loss" from re-compressing can get pretty severe.

Yes, I should have explained that. That's why I recommended high or maximum compression, which will usually do the job of reducing the filesize without any noticeable effect on the final print output.