I’ve heard a lot of buzz lately about folks not being able to send PDFs to people because of their size–especially photographers trying to send proofs sheets that were built in Lightroom or Photoshop. If you’ve been around Macs as long as I have, you may remember way back to the Tiger (10.4) operating system that had a ‘Compress PDF’ option in the print dialog.
Well if you’re still on Mac and have upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6) you’re in an incredible amount of luck. After doing away with the Compress PDF command in the OS, there’s a very simple FREE DOWNLOAD to bring it back! I’ve tested it and it works great–compressed a 42mb image loaded proof sheet down to 1.1mb! I also compared compressing with that method to using Adobe Acrobat Professional (my normal choice for compressing) and the difference was very minimal.
To try for yourself, click HERE to download the zip.
Install the package.
Open the PDF into Preview and choose File>Print.
At the bottom left of the print dialog, click PDF and you should now see ‘Compress PDF’ in the menu.
That’s it! Enjoy!
This very compact piece of equipment (for only around $25 I might add) allows me to very quickly level my camera on two axis’ (pitch and roll) so as not to get annoying perspective distortion. Having straight vertical and horizontal lines in architecture photography is aesthetically pleasing and doesn’t distract from the natural beauty of the architecture and/or design.