Request: Edit Image > Save as JPEGs (not PNGs)

[Special]

So I've been using the lovely "Edit Image" from within the Editor a lot lately and LOVE the convenience of having changes be applied imminently, but I've noticed that the images edited are always save as PNGs, which have its uses but can also can balloon in size compared to JPEGs, for example, I imported a bunch of JPEGs and turned them into a PDF, the JPEG images were all around 800KB ~ 1MB in size each, using the "Edit Image" feature from within the Editor and then saving the changes turns those same images as PNGs at around ~8MB each.

Can the changes be saved as JPEGs and still be applied imminently? The editor only seems to accept PNGs this way.

[Sasha - Tracker Dev Team]

Hello Special,

We won't save to JPEG, because:
1) The JPEG is the format with losses.
2) It does not support transparency.
3) Even if you will use JPEG resulting PDF will be greater because inserted/updated image will use zip compression.

Cheers,
Alex

[Special]

Why can't you support both? The Editor already accepts JPEGs as imports, so this seems trivial if when you edit some image in a paint program and save it as a JPEG instead, the Editor should pick this up.

[Lzcat - Tracker Supp]

Why can't you support both?

When extracting there is no reason to support JPEG because it is a lossy format and does not support transparency, which is required. No one would like to try and edit a table or diagram only to find it distorted by JPEG compression! Nor would it be pleasant to try and edit an image with transparency and see that transparency is gone!
There is only one possible way to use JPEG when passing images to the editor - when the original image was a JPEG itself and we can extract it "as is" - because uncompressing and subsequent compressing of an image in the JPEG format still distorts it. Unfortunately extracting JPEG images "as is" is not implemented (and to be honest not always possible).

The Editor already accepts JPEGs as imports, so this seems trivial if when you edit some image in a paint program and save it as a JPEG instead, the Editor should pick this up.

When adding an image the Editor recompresses it, and because JPEG is using lossy compression it is not used when we are adding new images, at least for now. We will try to improve such behavior in future.
At this time you can always Optimize your PDF files using File>Save As Optimized... and compress images in any way you prefer (or even downsample them if file size is a concern).
HTH.

[Special]

Can you add a "File>Save As Optimized" for select single pages then? I'd rather not have to do this process for the whole ~500MB PDF just for when I edit a single page.

[Patrick-Tracker Supp]

Hi Special,

Thanks for the suggestion. I've submitted a feature request for this. For now, you could use the extract pages feature and then run the optimisation on that new document.

Cheers!

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

When I open a PDF for editing in PagePlus, some images are JPG, others are PNG, and a few are JXR. There were no JXR images in the original PagePlus publication that was used to create the PDF. The JXR files have transparency.

IranView, and other image editors, can estimate the JPG compression used, and reuse that value when recompressing the image on saving. This avoids saving highly compressed JPG images as bloated images of low quality, keeping them small. However, high quality JPG images are recompressed without a lot of artefacts as would happen if an average value were used.

Using the same image type or the same JPG compression for all edited images is a very poor workflow.

I hope that you can do something a bit more intelligent for future versions. The code for export pages as different image types at different JPG compression qualities is clearly available in PDF-XChange Editor.

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Hi All,

I've just spoken with a colleague from the dev team that is working on this feature, and he has told me that unfortunately there are no easy solutions to this problem, and while we are looking at ways of improving this in the future, for the moment that's the only image editing option we can offer. There is lots of investigation and research going on at the moment - but I do not have any more specific details as to when we will be able to improve this feature. We are aware of it's current capabilities and their limits.

Regards,
Stefan