Compressing portofolio?

What’s the best way to compress a portfolio without losing image quality?

I figured .RAR might not be the best way, but I would also rather not have to go through my portfolio and replace all the pictures with lower quality ones.

FWIW, right my complete portfolio is 292 MB!! I think that is a bit much for only 5 projects…

What software was it created in ?

What format are you saving it out in?

Answer these two questions and i can provide you with some options.

Created in Illustrator. Saving as .PDF.

I feel like there should be a way to save it as a smaller size, but I can’t figure it out/find it.

When you save a PDF in Illustrator there are some default presets, but if you look to the left there is a category called “Compression”.

I recommend the following as a ballpark for a document that is light enough to send out but still look good for screen or 8x11 printing:

Usually you’ll have a size you want to hit (IE Under 10 mb)
Start at:
Bicubic Downsampling - 300ppi above 450 PPI
Compression JPEG
Quality Max

From there, you can work down to say 150ppi, to high compression. I would avoid going lower than high on the compression scale since you’ll start to get more noticable JPG artifacts.

With that setting you should get a much much smaller file.

Nuff said.

Thanks Mike!