Digital Light & Color

Some more information for those who might be interested.

I wanted to print an image of the format A2 from PWP8 to PDF file using a PDF print driver with as little image downsampling. Common free tools like Acrobat Reader, Foxit Reader and PDF Creator were not suitable for the job.

The image dimensions and size: 390mm x 550mm, 130MB
Required PDF dimensions: format A2 (420mm x 594mm)

After some searching for a free tool, I managed to achieve it with PDF Architect 7 free.
The resulting PDF file was about 79MB which is quite near to 70MB of jpeg file when saved from PWP8. The difference seems to be some PDF overhead. So far OK.

The following is quite interesting however:
1. when the image, saved as jpeg of 70MB, was loaded directly into Architect and converted into PDF, the resulting PDF size was about 35MB
2. with the image saved as tif of 126MB, the resulting PDF size was only about 14MB !

I have to admit that when printing from PWP, there are some parameters to set in the PDF Architect print driver including an option Downsample Yes/No which I set to NO.
I have not come across a similar option when I was loading the images directly into the Architect, which does not mean that it is not there, somewhere. But what is quite striking is the big and illogical (to me) difference of the size of the jpeg and tif images converted into PDF.
It looks as if the tif image was downsampled much more or more times then the jpeg.

PDF commonly saves images as JPEGs, but the size will depend on the JPEG quality setting. The Adobe PDF driver gives you the option of saving uncompressed images.

Bayphoto.com and Americanframe.com among other firms will print large photos on inkjet printers. You submit a .jpg or .tif in Adobe RGB or sRGB.

I believe he is located in the Czech Republic.

I believe in both Europe and the U.S. there are small shops that have a wide-format inkjet printer at the heart of their operation. Look for print shops that advertise "giclee"or "fine art prints" -- in various languages, of course. Some of the shops may state on their website that they have an Epson 3880 or whatever, so a Web search may find them.

Thanks all for your suggestions. I will see what comes up of the print of the Architect PDF file.

By the way, with Chroma Subsampling 4:4:4 I got up to 109MB of jpeg size (much nearer to 129MB of the tif file) but with no visible difference when compared to default 4:2:0, both at 100% quality.