How to make a proper PDF portfolio?

If you have InDesign, just drop every image to a separate page and export the whole thing.

Sorry. I'm an oblivious copywriter. I only have access to adobe programs. Can I do it in photoshop?

Ah!! That's a great and easy way!

However, I just tried it with 6 ads and the size was 17MB. Is this too large a file to send to people's emails? I can only imagine how many MBs the pdf would be if it was my entire portfolio.

Does Acrobat make smaller files?

ivan your hot

There is also a very easy way using Freehand. Freehand lets you have multipate pages in a single document. You import your images, put them is separate pages, after you are done, save it as a postcript file. Afer that, open Adobe Distiller and drag the postcript document into the distiller. The cool thing about it is that there are a couple of modes for distilling (smallest file size, newspaper, high quality, among others). Its realy easy after you get the hang of it. If you don't like that tnem you can just export the whole document as a pdf directly from Freehand. If you convert the fonts to outlines, the pdf will be larger, its up to you. Thats the way I always do it.

you said make each work no bigger than 200kb,the quality of each image is bad than,,, how to make the image to look still good in 200kb ???
Hana

use a better compressing program. Compress manually.
I use Fireworks and it's working fine.

Hi Ivan,
I have used your "Automate/PDF_Presentation" instruction to make a pdf portfolio
however my files are a bit pixelated, almost blurry. Do you have any idea
why this may be so?
Thanks.
Suzy

I am trying to place an image in a pdf portfolio as a background. Like Suzy my image is pixaled and blurry. Not good to give to my client. Acrobat portfolio seems to only read jpegs, gifs and png's for the backgrounds. My original file was created in Illustrator, which I then placed in photoshop as a vector smart object. I have tried various resolutions from 72 - 300 dpi. Its not working.
Can anyone help?
Jas

Whether using the Automate option with .tif or .jpg files doesn't make much of a difference does it?

If you don't know InDesign and you have CS4 you can also do it very well from Illustrator. Illustrator supports multiple artboards which get translated into pdf pages. Just make as many artboards as you need pages (you can add or remove with the new artboard tool if you like), specify the size you like.

This being done in Illustrator all of the vector data will be outputed as vectors and the text will be actual text so the whole file will take up less space.

After you're done save your file as PDF. It will output to a fairly large file. Open the pdf in Acrobat (Proffesional not the Reader), go to file-save as, choose Adobe PDF Optimised - click settings and set your compression preferences. (I use Bicubic downsampling to 100 ppi for images above 150; Compression Jpeg, Qualiti: High)

I think a monitor resolution is best for an electronic format, like 1024/768 because the portfolio will most likely be viewed on a computer. Also it will take less space than using a print format and it will fit better on an e-mail.

The images will most likely not look like the jpegs on your computer due to the downsampling and the way that Acrobat handles zoomed images but this is to be expected and hopefully good design shines through choppy images.

Hope it helps somebody.

If you need anything else drop me a line at www.adcoremedia.com or http://www.behance.net/tumant

Bogdan.

P.S. I got a 17 page portfolio to 3.6 MB if that's any indication.

Thanks to the above guest.

This was a great way of doing it. I had a 40 page A4 portfolio (already scaled down from A3) that I saved as a PDF book through Photoshop, ended up being about 150mb, obviously way too big for emails. As my work is a mix of web, film, music vids and photography, he/she above makes a good point that most people will be viewing it on a screen or at 72 dpi, so you can get away with having it in this format, and if you so wish, creating a 300dpi version as a classically printed portfolio or as a web gallery, again at 72 dpi. This was great as I had the hard copy for interviews and for myself and can now email the whole thing. It's about 7.5mb big now in the electronic format. I followed the settings for Acrobat professional as stated above and it's all good.

Much love !

40 pages is too much. Show just 10 best pieces of you work. You can show more if the agency asks. Try to keep the file size under 1MB. Have you tried online portfolio? There are so many sites that allow you to upload images....

Million thanks!

What if you don't have Adobe Photoshop, or Creative Suite, etc...But you want to make a PDF portfolio of several JPGs? Is that possible?

I need to create a pdf portfolio to include lots of InDesign projects, eg, book design and magazine design..How do I import these into the pdf as they are not just jpegs? Thanks

I hope you are not talking about 'word' the program, alvinpck. If you use word as a graphic designer then something is wrong, very much wrong.

Hi, I've just made my pdf portfolio in indesign, and uploaded it onto Issuu. If anyone would like to take a look, it can be found at this link:
http://issuu.com/Lyonsa/docs/portfolio_andrew_lyons

to the guest comment two above, you can export your indesign documents as Jpegs, save them in a folder somewhere, and then later import them into you new indesign portfolio document.

An another way is, you can make a Power point presentation and simply save it as a pdf file.

very nice

I don't know if this is helpful or not, but this tool called DocRaptor.com is great for generating pdfs. Here's the URL: http://docraptor.com

Thanks mikeadams. I used www.docraptor.com and loved it! Its so easy to use.

For 100 MB GB Page/MB is 60 if file type is email . Estimated pages are 6000 and estimated boxes are 2.4.
GB=1024 MB, by this you can calculate the estimated GB for PDG file.