Alright, school me on this, because I'm doing something wrong. I've got some old documents, scanned maps mostly. The resolution of a 3MB pdf in Acrobat is amazing, you can zoom in and see the pulp bits in the paper. When I open that same pdf in photoshop, every setting I use still ends up a blurry mess when I try to zoom in.

When I open the pdf in photoshop, I'm of course prompted for the size, resolution, color mode etc. Increasing the resolution to 150pixels/inch helps but the file size quickly jumps into the 100s of MB, and it still doesn't hold a candle to the Acrobat quality. Is this the correct approach, or should I be using a different color mode, or simply trying import from the pdf at like 500% size or so?

[Edited on October 31, 2006 at 7:09 PM. Reason : photoshop cs ver.8.0]

10/31/2006 7:08:05 PM

printscreen and start pasting into Photoshop?

10/31/2006 7:11:57 PM

Well, yes, I could zoom in Acrobat to an area of interest, copy/paste, then lather rinse repeat, but that's a real pain.

10/31/2006 8:56:36 PM

When you save the file in PS, are you using a compression?

You have to match the working resolution in photoshop to what the resolution of the image is, which may well bein the 100s of MB, without any type of compression.

10/31/2006 9:09:31 PM

set the zoom in pdf at 100% then printscreen and paste into photoshop

at 100% all pixels should be displayed

[Edited on October 31, 2006 at 9:12 PM. Reason : s]

10/31/2006 9:11:43 PM

photoshop does not care that you dont want to generate massive files. If you want to work in PS, you're going to get huge files. Then when you save them again it compresses them back down.

10/31/2006 9:21:01 PM

^^hahahahahahah wow, I can't believe you even suggested that.

Open it in photoshop at 300pixels/inch 8bit RGB then save it as a png or psd. Photoshop uses a ton of memory, just get used to it.

11/1/2006 2:07:01 AM

Yea, I just cleared out an extra couple gigs of swap space and waited.

11/1/2006 3:03:56 AM