Sharp photos and small pdf's

[FredVN]

After a photo shoot, I like to send the model not only the hires photos, but also an e-book. I use Affiniy Publisher 2 for this.

To make this in terms of file size not too big I compress the jpg's to < 1 M and for the pdf export use raster pdi 72 or 96. I leave the other values unchanged.

Logically, the result is often a “bit less”: especially not sharp. Until now I can get somewhat sharper shots with somewhat larger jpg's, but also very large pdf's.

Who has experience with a more optimal setup of such a photo book: sharp pictures and small pdf? 

[thomaso]

When you export as PDF with JPG compression it may reduce the visual quality unnecessarily if you have resized / recompressed the single image files before. With other words: use for the layout document the highres images and let the downscaling + recompressing to the PDF export procedure.

Apart from that Affinity creates relatively large PDF files sizes which differ from others with similar JPG compression.

Affinity doesn't offer an option to sharpen on export. Instead you could try in the export options the two "Lanczos" resampling methods, they both have a sharpening effect.

Personally I meanwhile prefer for such situations to export with high quality + low or no compression + apply to the resulting file a separate step for the file size reduction (recompressing and possibly resizing, depending on the exported file type). To reduce single image files I use "ImageOptim" / for PDF I use "Acrobat". There are probably other tools available for images and PDF, some of them as online-tools.

[FredVN]

Thanks. This gives a series of good leads for some tests. I will be working on them over the next few days. Especially towards a good option for pdf compression.

 And let hear the result, of course.

[FredVN]

Yes, these are the hints I needed.

Test
Booklet: 15 random jpg , 10-27 Mb
In different ways page filled
AFPUB 280 Mb
PDF 400 dpi 86 Mb
PDF 300 dpi 96 Mb HUH?????
Both jpg compression on and 100% quality

Then the 400 dpi 86 Mb compressed with https://www.ilovepdf.com/compress_pdf 
Free and works very simply.
Unfortunately a limit of 200 Mb

There are 3 types of compression resulting in:
Low 1.3 Mb
Medium 5.6 Mb
High 17.0 Mb.

Actually I wanted to test a few different options but the result with the hires photos and the highest dpi is good enough for me at the moment.

Later I will see if I can optimize this some more.

@Thomaso: thanks again.

 

[thomaso]

On 7/17/2023 at 4:09 PM, FredVN said:

also an e-book.

To make this in terms of file size not too big I compress the jpg's to < 1 M and for the pdf export use raster pdi 72 or 96.

4 hours ago, FredVN said:

PDF 400 dpi 86 Mb
PDF 300 dpi 96 Mb HUH?????

Did your plans change – or what makes you export with 400 dpi? Well, for screen-view (as e-book or PDF) a higher DPI would allow more zooming without quality loss if the images are accordingly large. For print 400 dpi wouldn't really help.

Concerning the 300 vs 400 dpi export file size I only can think of different export options. Possibly the Downsampling limit or the Resampling method?

5 hours ago, FredVN said:

Then the 400 dpi 86 Mb compressed with https://www.ilovepdf.com/compress_pdf 
(...)
There are 3 types of compression resulting in:
Low 1.3 Mb
Medium 5.6 Mb
High 17.0 Mb.

Are these indeed the resulting file sizes of the entire 86 MB pdf?

[FredVN]

The main reason to use 400 dpi is to export in the highest quality. Then just one time compress the pdf.

The goal remains an e-book. If models want to print it they can just do that from that higher resolution. For that I do always make sure that the booklet has a multiple of 4 pages.

And yes, those are indeed the file sizes from that 86 Mb. 
On a future shoot, I want to use both ILovePDF and compression within Publisher to assess the differences in both file size and quality.

Now looking for a model… 😀