I took a Word doc, converted it to a high res PDF, then converted it to CMYK in PS. Because it is for a booklet and I have 100 pages, I then placed the pages in ID. When I saved it to a high res PDF my file is now 750MB. How do I save a high res PDF for print production to a manageable size with out losing my resolution.
A:
First, this entire Q&A belongs not on StackOverflow, which is for programming questions, but instead probably on Superuser.
Anyway, to answer your question: You don't.
Print production demands high resolution, compared to web or screen media. Typically a printed piece is printed using a halftone of about 150 to 300 lines per inch. (That's lines of halftone dots, not pixels or the dots that make up the halftone cells. 150 is typical for most printed items, 200 and up for art books and finer products.) To create a printed image without noticeable pixelization or degradation, you want about 1.5 times the pixel resolution of the halftone screen. (See Adobe, Quark, or Corel print guides for this technical info.) This means you need an image of about 300 ppi (pixels per inch) when printing using a 150 line screen. Note that's 300 ppi unscaled. So placing a small image that's 300 pixels square and stretching it to two inches square won't work; it's only 150 ppi when it gets imaged on the press plate.
CMYK images are 8-bits for each of four channels. An 8x10 "full page" image is 7.2 million pixels. 7.2 million times 8 bits times 4 = 230.4 million bits, or 28.8 megabytes. If you have such an image on every page of a 100 page document, the entire file should come in around a whopping 2800 MB. Thanks to compression, and the fact that you probably don't have a large image on every page, it is much smaller.
JYelton
2010-08-27 17:28:17