Today’s Question: I started to work on a family project and have scanned a large number of photos. Some of these are saved as PDF documents, but I now realize I need a different format like JPEG to work in Lightroom Classic or Photoshop. How do you recommend I convert the PDFs for the most efficient workflow?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can easily convert the PDF documents to images in a few different ways. It is also possible to open PDF documents directly in Photoshop, including choosing which pages of the PDF you want to open as images so you can then save them in the desired format.
More Detail: While you wouldn’t normally save a photo as a PDF document, it is certainly possible to do so. For example, you can save an image as a PDF in Photoshop, and as indicated in today’s question, in many cases when scanning photo prints the default may be to save the resulting images as a PDF document. However, applications such as Lightroom Classic don’t support PDF documents, so you would need to convert the documents to images.
There are a number of ways you could go about doing this. If all the PDF documents consist of only one page, you can easily batch process a selection of PDF documents into images using Adobe Bridge. Start by selecting the documents in Bridge, then from the menu choose Tools > Photoshop > Image Processor. This will launch Photoshop and bring up the Image Processor dialog, with the documents from Bridge automatically selected for processing. You can then select the image format and other options and process the documents in batch. If the PDF documents consist of more than one page, however, only the first page will be converted to an image using this method.
Another option is to use the free online Adobe Acrobat PDF to image converter to process a PDF document (including those consisting of multiple pages) to individual images. You simply upload your PDF, choose the image format you want to convert to, and click the Convert button to process the PDF. You can then download the resulting images to your computer. This free converter can be found here:
https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online/pdf-to-jpg.html
If you have access to Adobe Acrobat Pro (such as with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription beyond the Photography Plan) you can export all pages of a PDF to images. Simply open the PDF in Acrobat Pro and from the menu choose File > Export To > Image and then choose the image format you want to use. You can then choose the location and filename to use, along with image settings applicable to the format you’ve selected and click the Save button to process all pages of the PDF document to individual images.
Any of these methods will enable you to convert the images that had been saved as PDF documents into an image format supported by other software such as Lightroom Classic.
