Inserting a small PSD-logo in indesign doubles the size of the PDF...

[Bartattack]

I have a layout in indesign and when I make a PDF it's about 5MB in filesize (high quality setting). . Now when I put a psd with logo in it (300 DPI - 4 cm x 1 cm) and make the same PDF with the same settings... filesize goes up to 13 MB.  When the logo is copied in indesign..filesize of the PDF goes up even higher to 27MB...
When I remove the logo..filesize is back to 5Mb.

tried copy and pasting the logo in a new file... tried saving as png and even jpg...etc... the pdf filesize stays abnormally large.

this is the psd file btw:  http://download.artattack.be/UZLykD3

When you put this logo in an empty indesign file...and make a pdf. the size is about 7 MB (on high quality settings).

any idea why this thing is making my pdf's so large? it doesn't make sense...

[Dov Isaacs]

This question really has nothing to do with Acrobat Printing & Prepress issues, but rather, PDF export from InDesign.

Moving this topic to the InDesign forum.

          - Dov

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

You are not going to believe what I found in your PSD file!

The file you posted was 4.62 megabytes in size. The reality is that over 4 megabytes of that file was XMP metadata that recorded the history of file edits made on that image.

I eliminated virtually all that useless metadata, losslessly maintaining all the original image data, and the resultant .PSD file is only 267 kilobytes!!!

(There is no built-in tool for clearing the metadata in Photoshop, but if you losslessly save the .PSD file as a .PDF file that can be re-edited in Photoshop, you can use the Save as Optimized PDF function in Acrobat Pro to strip away the metadata - don't resample or remove anything else! I opened the resultant PDF file in Photoshop and resaved as a .PSD file.)

Try the attached .PSD file and see if that solves your problem a little bit. Let us know if that helps! 

          - Dov

[Bartattack]

Yep. removing the metadata solved the problem. PDF size went from 27MB to 5MB. it seems they included the whole history log in the logo which is unnecessary for us. Strange that when you make a PDF, the PSD metadata has such an impact on the PDF filesize.
Thanks for the help.