: Photoshop: losing quality when exporting to PDF I have created a 1-page flyer in Photoshop at 72dpi as we are not printing this. I finished the artwork and im needing to save it to PDF, but

@Lengel450

One solution might be to not save as PDF directly from Photoshop and instead just save as a .PNG, .Tiff or .jpg, then use Acrobat to convert the image file to PDF. That might preserve the appearance better.

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@Steve758

So this is def more than a hack than i wanted to be in order to get the same results but turns out by changing my from 72dpi to 110dpi it got the pdf closer to the result i wanted

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@Jamie315

So, the problem is that you think dpi is a fixed size. It is not.

If you screencap something, it has fixed pixel dimension, but the "72 ppi for a screengrab" is sort of a hack: this is obvious when you consider that the "i" in ppi means "inches" and that there are 1080p 13 inch monitors and 1080p 50 inch monitors. Exact same pixel dimensions, different physical size.

For a PDF, though, the program is primarily aimed at physical printouts, so there is an specified physical size to reckon with, and the typical rule of thumb is going to be 300dpi/ppi (printed/downsampled; note that dpi and ppi are different but similar enough for informal conversation).

A 1920 x 1080 screencap unresampled (unaltered) is only suitable for about 6.5 x 3.5 inches. If you drop it full-size onto a letter-sized paper, it must be upsampled (or worse: stretched), and this results in a quality loss. This is the resizing that @billy Kerr mentions.

Aside from this, zooming any image on a screen is going to result in some loss of quality, and your pdf zoom level is not going to be faithful to the printed version. The 100% screencap is native resolution, the PDF is simulated, and often the 100% page size does not align with a physical ruler anyway.

So the short answer is: set up your PDF print size to be exactly px-width/300 by pix-height/300 inches and your images will not be resized or resampled.

Further: ppi is a flag set in the headers and is really only a recommendation. Not all image file formats even support the ppi flag. Only the pixels in are actual image data.

Do a deep-dive on ppi on this stackexchange and you will find more tangential discussion about dpi/ppi. Look especially for the term "effective resolution."

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@Goswami567

It's because you are enlarging the image when you open the PDF in the viewer. The image only has a finite number of pixels, and when you increase the size it will look blurry.

You'd need to view it at the same size as the original to get the same quality. The issue is the size of the viewer/screen display, not the output of the PDF being changed to lower quality.

To put it bluntly, 72 dpi is not good enough quality if the PDF is to be opened full size on a large high resolution computer monitor. Increase the DPI to something like 120dpi instead (assuming the image is good enough resolution to begin with). You should see a marked improvement. If the file size is too big, change the compression settings when exporting as PDF.

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@Sims5801359

There should be a dialog box when saving your PDF from Photoshop. See the 'Adobe PDF Preset' dropdown at the very top of this dialog. Try exporting via different presets and see which one works better. The 'High Quality Print' or 'Press Quality' should give you the best results.

Also look into the 'Compression' tab and try turning off some of those settings.

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