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Post Processing of Color PDF's


seligman

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Hello everyone, I'm new here.

I recently purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 Document Scanner and I'm looking for suggestions on post-processing of color PDF files.

What I have are thousands of pages of documents printed on a standard B&W Laserjet with brief annotations using a colored pen and occasional highlighter use (various colors). Some of the employee manuals I need to scan have rudimentary diagrams, charts, or printed text using basic colors but nothing fancy (i.e. no photos). In fact, extreme color precision isn't necessary at all. All I care about is distinguishing between basic colors, such that the yellows look yellow, the reds look red, and so on. These PDF's will be viewed on a computer screen or smart phone, and rarely (if ever) printed out again.

Unfortunately, this scanner doesn't support TWAIN so my scan options are limited. PDF and JPEG are the only formats available. Fujitsu did provide a compression slider for color scans. I ran a series of PDF tests using a page with fairly substantial color use. Least compressed was 1.57 MB, compared to 284 KB most compressed. And a regular B&W scan same resolution was just 57 KB.

Even at the highest compression level, the quality is still greater than I need. The bigger file sizes are proving troublesome when emailing the PDF's for a variety of reasons. Some companies limit file attachments to 10 MB. That lowers the page count you can e-mail in a single PDF file which is very frustrating.

So here are my questions pertaining to Photoshop:

1. Can Photoshop further compress these PDF's beyond the capability of the Fujitsu software? If yes, what's the best method?
2. What about reducing the PDF file size another way, perhaps by reducing color depth?

In both scenarios, I'm particularly interested if batch processing is available. Any other comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated as well.

Thanks!
-seligman
 

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