: Does Photoshop render extracted PDF pages better than Acrobat? I've read that using Photoshop rather than Acrobat to extract pages from a PDF produces a better rendering. Is this true? Why?

@Vandalay110

Better is slightly context sensitive. But yes the view you have in PDF reader is often optimized for speed, where as a pixel graphics software can afford to rasterize the thing by super sampling. But then your graphic is no longer vector and you have all problems associated with that. On the other hand text usually suffers a horrible fate by super sampling. Other benefits include 16 bit color.

This isn't better in my mind just different. In any case none of the AA routines implemented by adobe are stellar*. Better ones exist, if you can spare the computational resources then you can do MUCH better.

The vector data is much better for the print rasterizer as it does not concern itself with anti aliasing of the data much. So in fact the PDF may be much better in many instances even when it has rendering issues. So in many ways its a yes it can be better in some cases and yes it can be worse in others.

So if somebody claims it to be better, then I have no problem with that. If somebody claims the other way around and says its worse I would be fine by that claim too.

* Like make the sampling in linear space and convert it to work space.

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