How to Reduce PDF File Size in Illustrator

what's up y'all wala moose here in today's video we're going to be talking about how to reduce pdf file size using adobe illustrator but before i begin my name is josh aka walla moose and i post videos here on youtube once a week with videos regarding graphic design so if you're interested in that please subscribe i'd love to have you along for the ride so without further ado let's jump in here and get started alrighty so we're here in adobe illustrator and as you can see here i've got a seven page pdf um it's pretty high resolution with some high quality images so i went ahead and exported this just as is and it came out to as you can see here 346.5 megabytes which is certainly too large for a seven page pdf uh you wouldn't be able to email that probably send it to your printer anything like that so we're going to shrink in that in this video hopefully get it below 5 megabytes so let's jump in here and do that so what you're going to do don't do anything with your file we're just going to leave it as is and go up here to file save as copy you can also do save as but i like to do save as copy just so i have my illustrator files separate from my pdf and there's no concern about crossover so save this copy and it's going to pull up this your standard save window just figure out where you want to save it and make sure the format is pdf and hit save all right so after you do that it's going to pull up this secondary option window and this is where we can change the settings on decreasing the file size so up here at the top there's adobe pdf presets um you can actually save your own so you can reference this in the future and just hit with a click of button and have all these settings ready to go but for this what we're going to do is go down here to smallest file size and what some people do is hit smallest file size and export but the images come back a bit blurry so we're going to fix that now before i do that one thing to note is this option is unticked it's preserve illustrator editing capabilities it is smaller because it doesn't have all the editing metadata included with it and so if you want to be able to edit this pdf in illustrator in the future have this checked but if you want the smallest possible file size have it unchecked and again that's why i like having my illustrator file separate from my pdf so i can do that but we're going to do to have high quality images at a smaller file size go to compression over here and you got your color your grayscale and your monochrome images these are the settings for that so having the smallest file size automatically bumped it down to 100 pixels per inch at a low quality 150 and the 300 so in in order to ensure that it's very high quality we want to change these numbers to 300 ppi medium 300 and medium and then the last one the monochrome is fine with 300 and 450. now one thing to note if if this or if this file comes back still too big you can change these to low or minimum and it shouldn't affect the quality actually just for the purpose of this video i'm going to do low just to show y'all that it's high quality and it's even a smaller small file size so after that's all done hit save it's going to give you some warnings and then this one it's going to give you a warning since you unchecked the preserve illustrator edited capabilities it's just going to let you know so that's okay i did that on purpose and then it's gonna export all right and let's see how it did so again i had my big file size at 346 megabytes and this small one that i just did with those new settings is drum roll why isn't it loading there we go my computer was about to crash um 4.5 megabytes so yeah we accomplished our goal of wanting it less than five megabytes and we took it from about half a gig all the way down to 4.5 megabytes which is huge now if that's still too big again go back and just change it to minimum as opposed to low or medium and you should be good to go now one thing to note is if it's still not small enough you may have a problem with your file either there's too many vertices if it's a very like high quality image with a lot of shapes or if you like image trace something and it's like basically a vector version vector version of a photo or if like each of your images is like a couple of megabytes what you can do is just change the images to a lower size within the file and that way when you export it there's less to transfer over the pdf alrighty so that's it for that video i hope it helped if it uh shrinking shrunk shrunk reduced what's the word reduced your file size uh let me know in the comments if you have any questions please let me know in the comments as well um if you liked it leave a thumbs up subscribe do all the fun stuff and i will see you in the next video thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Wallamoose

Views: 130,714

Keywords: how to reduce PDF file size in Illustrator, how to reduce PDF file size, how to reduce file size of a PDF, how to reduce file size of a PDF in illustrator, Illustrator Tutorial, how to export a PDF in Illustrator, how to export a PDF using Illustrator, how to make a PDF smaller in Illustrator, how to make a PDF smaller, how to make a PDF less than 5Mb in Illustrator, how to make a PDF 5mb, how to reduce a PDF file in Illustrator, wallamoose, how to make a PDF in Illustrator

Id: 9nYImFJBKSg

Length: 5min 5sec (305 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022