Extracting Images From a PDF
There are many ways of extracting images from a PDF:
- Use a third-party Adobe Acrobat plugin like Enfocus Pitstop Professional to select, copy, and paste the image right out of the PDF.
- Open the PDF in another Adobe CS3 product like Photoshop (you will have the opportunity to rasterize a certain page of the PDF at the resolution you would like) or Illustrator (some weird conversion might take place, but you’ll likely be able to extract the image).
- If you need the image for an InDesign layout, you could place the PDF itself right into InDesign and pull in the frame edges to crop the photo. Not ideal, but a quick fix.
If you need to extract an image from Reader without the use of any additional software, that is possible too, and this can actually be a good solution depending on what you need the image for.
- Open the PDF in Adobe Reader
- Navigate to proper page and location in the PDF with the image you wish to extract
- Get the image as large as you can on you screen
- Take a screenshot (For Example, Command-Shift-3 (or 4) on a Mac)
- You may need to crop or resize your results, but you got the image out!
The screenshot solution can be very useful but remember:
- Don’t zoom in to the point the image becomes pixelated looking.
- Your screenshot will be 72 DPI. The only way to get better resolution is to shrink it.
More discussion about this topic here.
