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Friday, 29th March 2024

Irish Born Chinese

Compressing PDF files (Mac only)

Created Saturday, 2nd April 2011, 13:30 by Whykay
I know people must come across problems when they try to reduce a huge PDF file down to a small file size. In my case, I was getting inverted colours from a file generated from Indesign. So I thought I might share this free alternative to all those programs out there, and if you don't want to fork out huge amount of money for Acrobat Professional.

This is going to be a solution for the Mac.
  1. Go to your Finder
  2. Click on Applications
  3. Click on your Utilities Folder
  4. Click on ColorSync Utility.app
  5. Once its open, switch to the "Filters" panel (which will list all of the filters you currently have available)
  6. In the lower left, click on the “+” button which will create a new filter
  7. Name the filter whatever you want and press return.
  8. To the right of the filter’s name, choose the down arrow and a menu will pop up.
  9. From that pop-up menu, choose “Add Image Effects Component”, and from that menu choose “Image Compression”.
  10. Adjust the image compression Mode to JPEG.
  11. Adjust the image compression quality however you'd prefer.
  12. To the right of the filter’s name, choose the down arrow and a menu will pop up.
  13. From that pop-up menu, choose “Add Color Management Component", and from that menu pick "Convert to Profile".
  14. Pick sRGB IEC61966-2.1 | CMYK data | All objects 
  15. The next time you use Preview to “Save As...”, you'll have a new option under Quartz filters.
The colours are not inverted and the file size has compressed. 

Thanks to the following from where I got the steps from:-