Quartz Filters

Does anyone happen to know why the "quartz filters" in this thread just trashed a number of my pdf's with images in them? I have some images that went from color to a very bad black and white and some color images that went to all green with no definition.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1292868?start=0&tstart=0
I've got hundreds of pdf's that I have printed in the past year (from images and from scans) and these are anywhere from 10 MB to 900 MB in size). I've been basically scouring the forums for a solution and I finally found the above thread only to find out it is trashing my files when I run it.
Apparently the text only files are fine?
Anyone on the Aperture forum competent to give me a heads up on this because this one is making it hard to get work done since I can't email 66 MB files through my email pipe.
Is there a paid solution that will let me downsize these (and print them) to a manageable size without worrying about trashing them?
TIA and apologies if this is a little off-topic.
Thanks.

You're not. See <http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1658162&#1658162>.
But no one has offered any help there either, I'm afraid. What happens when either you or the client prints the pages in question? (I'm curious because I can get graphics to appear properly, but they either don't print or the image prints with a gray screen over it. I think I may be having a different problem than you....)
iBook G4 w/ SuperDrive (Winter 2005) Mac OS X (10.4.4) I'm not a programmer--just a dedicated Mac user.

Similar Messages

Problem Mountain lion, Pages PDF and Quartz filters

Hello,
With some PDF file created with Pages (iWork 4.2) in Moutain Lion, Quartz Filter don't work.
Example :
- Create a new doc with template "Personnal News" ("Nouvelles Personnelles in french) in "Newsletter"
- Print dialog, "PDF" button "Open PDF with Preview"
- In Preview, export in PDF with filter "Gray Tone"
--> Problem : The PDF created is not in "Gray tone" but in color
--> Same problems with others Quartz Filter, they do anything
- With template "School" ("Lycée" in French) --> Final PDF is a mix of color and gray tone !
- With template "Extrems Sports" (Sports Extremes in french) --> No problem, quartz filters works
If i create the PDF with page export and use "Preview" (or Color Sync utility"), Do a PDF export with a Quartz filters.
--> same problem
No problem with same manipulations before Mountain Lion (in Lion, ...). I think it's a Moutain Lion bug but it's very strange!
Has anyone noted this bug?
Is anyone know a solution to this pb?
Thanks
Note :
- I have the problem with a simple update of Lion in Moutain Lion and after a clean install of Moutain Lion.
- I have a boot disk with 10.5 Leopard and if i open the pdf file with Preview, the PDF file exported with quartz filter is ok.

I think it's a Moutain Lion bug, i hope it will be fixed in the next update of Moutain Lion...
But, i have found a workaround for this issue.
With a PDF file with this problem :
- Open the PDF with "Preview"
- Print, button "PDF", "Save to PostScript Format"
- Open the PS file with "Preview" --> Conversion to format PDF
- Save the PDF file
- Reopen this PDF file with Preview
--> Export can be do with Quartz filter (sometime with filter "Gray Tone", Preview crach, but with filter "Reduce File size", no problem
--> If a use "PDF Clerk Pro" to export this PDF with quartz filter, all filters work.

Bugs in PDF workflow/ Quartz Filters?

I've noticed several issues with PDF workflows in Lion that seem to have gone wrong. Whether deliberately or not, I don't know.
1. If you Export a PDF from Preview with a Quartz Filter, that filter is not applied to the copy of the PDF in Preview's window, though the file on disk does get the filter applied. If you close and reload the PDF, the effects of filter will be displayed.
2. If you create a new Quartz Filter in ColorSync Utility, it doesn't work.
Even duplicating an existing system filter, like "Gray Tone", doesn't work when you apply it to a PDF document in ColorSync Utility.
3. If you do have any user quartz filters, they don't show up in Preview's Export file dialog, unless you copy them from ~/Library/Filters to ~/Library/PDF Services.
There are several webpages about this.
4. Save As PDF-X has disappeared from the PDF button of the print menu.
I have seen other webpages that mention this.
All these issues are on both of my Macs, so I don't think it's a local problem, though I would be grateful for any confirmation.

Thanks Benwiggy for that tip.
I am still running Snow Leopard due to things dropped in Lion.
I needed fax capability before I could move to Lion.
I was also waiting for the bugs to get worked out because I will lose some time when changing over.
I still have the menu item with Snow Leopard but the work flow for PDF-X is now broken as well.
I have not always had Acrobat pro.
I am famialure with inserting, extracting, and typing information on PDF documents as one would need to do in an office.
I had always used preview and the PDF-X "save as" feature to embed fonts.
I see there is a save as format to "PDF/X" in Acrobat Pro v9.0.
There is a settings button next to the save as box.
It has four different settings or flavors of PDF/x:
PDF/X-1a
PDF/X-3
PDF/X-4
PDF/X-4p.
Then there is a conversion box that allows input of a "conversion profile".
There there is a viewing or printing condition box as well.
As you can see I don't work with colors much. It is all about preserving the text and images in a document as everything is usually black and white or grey scale.
What setting for PDF/X would you suggest if "font" embedding was an issue and it was desirable to preserve the text and images as they were, without regard to color correcton.
Thanks in advance for your reply.

Quartz Filters Not Working Mavericks

I have a Mac Book Air running the latest OS. I created a document in Pages 5. Printed it to PDF then opened it in Preview to apply the Grey Tone filter. I export it and choose the filter, but it doesn't apply. I can't apply any filters, at all.
Any ideas?

I found this work-around:
The solution I realized involves the following:
Right click the PDF file you desire to work with and then select "Open with..."
Select the "Colorsync Utility" application
The Colorsync Utility will open up with your PDF file
At the bottom of Colorsync Utility status bar, you can select the quartz filter you wish to apply (including any custom ones you made)
Press "Apply"
Save the document
I hope this workaround can hold up for now. I do admit I miss the ability to see and use my quartz filters right out of preview.
Take care.
Supplied by mrrish_

Quartz filters are not working (for PDF)

It seems that quartz filters are not working for me under Mountin Lion. I have tried to export, print, etc everything in Preview, Automator, ColorSync. It simply won't apply the filters to my PDFs.
Anyone experienced similar issues? Is it a known bug?

I kinda have the same problem, except its only my custom filters that aren´t working in ColorSynch. The other filters get applied as usual, but I can not change any of the preformed filters within ColorSynch, and the "live update from filter inspector" doesn´t work if I try to apply changes or use my custom filters.
The custom filters I have, were created prior to my upgrade from snow leopard to moutain lion.
I´ve understood that there has been multiple problems with the filters in lion ++
If there isn´t a quick fix to this, does anybody know of any programs I can use to apply filters without having to buy Adobe Pro, my use is not for simply decreasing file size, but mostly for editing colors prior to prinitng. And its not sufficient to use the preformed filters unfortunately.

Quartz Filters - Negative PDF images

Trying to create a Reduced size PDF using the Quartz filter in Automater. The output PDF views in Acrobat as a negative image. Preview views the file correct.
I emailed the PDF to a client for approval and he opened in acrobat which showed the negative.
It seems to me that Preview is saving the file so it can only be viewed correctly by preview.
Any thoughts Apple?

You're not. See <http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1658162&#1658162>.
But no one has offered any help there either, I'm afraid. What happens when either you or the client prints the pages in question? (I'm curious because I can get graphics to appear properly, but they either don't print or the image prints with a gray screen over it. I think I may be having a different problem than you....)
iBook G4 w/ SuperDrive (Winter 2005) Mac OS X (10.4.4) I'm not a programmer--just a dedicated Mac user.

Quartz filters in Colorsync Utility to improve print quality

I have trying to improve my printed output. I have set up my camera and iPhoto to get accurate, known colour into my system. I have also installed a custom profile for my printer which improved the colours considerably but the prints were still a little dark.
To fix this, I created a new Quartz filter in Colorsync Utility using the Brightness intermediate transform. My problem is that the Brightness transform has three unmarked, uncalibrated sliders. I think the middle one is brightness and the last one is contrast but I'm only guessing.
Anyone know what the sliders actually do?
This post is probably a bit cryptic in an attempt to keep it brief and cut to my problem but I've spent a lot of time getting to this point and I am happy to answer any questions on the other steps in the process for others who are further down the Colorsync learning curve.
1.8 GHz MBP Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Hello Bruce,
I ran this one by a couple of the 'colour specialists' in the office. One thought the sliders may be for R, G & B but they were guessing and we spent some time searching for an answer but found nothing. We even tried to look at some of the existing profiles, such as Sepia, but found them to be locked and not viewable. Anyway, you've got them intrigued so I think they'll work this one out for you soon, unless someone else knows the answer already.
Paul

Where did Quartz filters go?

I routinely used the "Reduce File Size" Quartz filter in the ColorSync section of the Print dialog. It appears that the ColorSync options are now gone. Anyone know a workaround for this?

and
i was able to "save as" as opposed to jumping through the version hoops (which i don't like much at all).
i say was, because a restart has returned everything to normal.
i wonder if there is a way to force the "save as" menu item?

Apply Quartz filter to a PDF from command line

Hello
I'm trying to apply a quartz filter to a PDF document via the command line. I know it's possible with Python and there's a script at /Developer/Examples/Quartz/Python/filter-pdf.py that does just that. The problem with this is that the script is Python 2.3 and my OS X 10.5.8 is running Python 2.5 - so I'm getting the error message:
+<Error>: The function `CGPDFDocumentGetMediaBox' is obsolete and will be removed in an upcoming update. Unfortunately, this application, or a library it uses, is using this obsolete function, and is thereby contributing to an overall degradation of system performance. Please use `CGPDFPageGetBoxRect' instead.+
I don't know Pyton but I checked the file and I grep'ed the Developer folder to see if I can find where CGPDFDocumentGetMediaBox is being used, but no matter what I changed, I didn't manage to get the script working.
So I guess my question is one of the following:
How can I update the developer example to a new, functioning version?
or how do I get rid of the deprecated functions that script is using?
or is there any other way to apply a quartz filter to a PDF via the command line? (I've read that SIPS is able to accomplish this, but I couldn't find out how..)
Thank you for any help!
Cheers

There a quartz filter printer hidden in OS X which makes applying a quartz filter to a PDF file on the command line a piece of cake. This is the syntax:
+/System/Library/Printers/Libraries/./quartzfilter inputfile filterpath outputfile+
So if I wanted to convert big.pdf to small.pdf it would go like this:$
+/System/Library/Printers/Libraries/quartzfilter big.pdf /System/Library/Filters/Reduce\ File\ Size.qfilter small.pdf+
The "Reduce File Size" filter isn't that great though when it comes to reducing the file size for printing. Jerome Colas wrote a nice article about quartz filters though: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6109445&tstart=0
You can also create your own with the ColorSync utility in Mac OS X. A Quartz filter is nothing but an XML, so you could also generate one on the fly if necessary.
Resource: http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=25916

Reducing file size #2...Preview, Quartz Filter vs Adobe Pro Optimize

Questions on reducing a pages to pdf file…I will post each question seperatly.
2) I read that you can reduce file size of a pdf in preview with a quartz filter. I created my own filer and it worked as expected. But, I also have Adobe Acrobat Pro, with save as PDF Optimized. The pro seems to have much more capability than the quartz filters.
Is one better that the other to use? The adobe optimize (standard settings) took it from 20 to 6 megs.
THanks, Bob

The Adobe Acrobat settings you chose are probably using .jpeg to reduce the file size.
.jpegs are lossy. ie You lose detail and sharpness the more you compress the image.
The Quartz filters are usually of very high quality, but they are a black box and you need to understand what the settings are in each one. Quartz filters are extremely powerful, fast and as I said usually high quality but I suggest you experiment and see if they meet your needs.
Peter

PDF reduce file size filters and CMYK to RGB conversion

This doesn't seem to be on-topic to this forum, but I'm hoping someone here has the expertise to answer my question. We have some scripts which take a series of press-quality pdfs and use the "reduce file size" filter to prepare them for viewing on the web. We run these scripts on a 10.4 machine, and the filter works very well, reliably reducing file sizes of all sorts of pages.
When we tried to upgrade the machine, we discovered that the quartz filtering has changed in 10.5 and 10.6. While it's usually an improvement, getting maybe 5-10% better compression ratios, it has become unreliable in that about 5% of my files fail spectacularly -- they blow up to 3, 4, 5, 6 times the original size.
The other thing that happens is that the 10.5/10.6 filters munge the colors up. I found the solution to this -- in the ColorSynchUtility, make a duplicate of the Reduce File Size filter, and add a Color Management Component called Convert To Profile. This allows me to set a filter that converts the CMYK content to RGB. The problem is that there are about 40 choices of profiles, and it's not at all clear what I should use. Many of them have printer manufacturer's names in them, some say "Adobe", others have cryptic codes (probably referring to various RFCs and schemes). I've tried a couple of the ones that don't look like they are for printers, basically chosen at random. They all produce files of slightly different sizes for the reductions that go well, but on the files that blow up, some filters are better than others. (For example, I have a 5MB page which reduces to 1.4MB with the 10.4 filter, but blows up to 27MB with the "sRGB IE61966-2.1" profile, but only 12MB with the "Adobe RGB" profile.)
So I have 2 questions:
1) Is there any way to configure a 10.5/10.6 custom profile so that it behaves as reliably as the 10.4 "stock" PDF Reduce File Size works? It doesn't have to be the most wonderful compression algorithm out there, just so that it never or rarely has a file blow up in size.
2) For converting press documents to pdfs that are going to go on the web, what is a good "Convert to profile" to use of the 40-some choices on the pull-down menu?

Cathy,
You have posted your question in a forum dedicated to the Final Cut Studio application Color. It is a very specialized program to grade (adjust) the color in video/film images. We know nothing regarding PDFs.
Have you tried posting this on an Adobe support site?
Good luck,
x

Quartz Filter WARNING!

Does anyone know why the "quartz filters" in this thread just totally trashed a 10 MB pdf with color images so that the images are now a green color and almost unreadable?
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1292868?start=0&tstart=0
I have been desperately trying to find a way to make my pdf's emailable (not to mention small enough so they don't take up 100 GB on my hard drive) but these filters (I'm running 150 dpi) seem to be TRASHING my pdf's.
Anyone know what is up with this?
Do mac users not use pdf's?
Is there a way to downsize my pdf's by buying external software??!!
HEEE-EEEELP!

Jon, I've followed most of that thread.
I don't believe it does move them to the trash, I find none here.
The only chance of recovery would be to quit using that drive at all, boot from a different drive & see if any of these can find remnants of the files, but I don't hold a lot of hope...
Data Rescue...
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
(Has a Free Demo to see if it could or not, but you'll need another drive to recover to).
rccharles on file recovery...
"Stellar Phoenix Macintosh - Mac data recovery software, recovers data from damaged, deleted, or corrupted volumes and even from initialized disks."
They have a trial version, so I guess you can see if your data can be recovered...
http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-data-recovery.htm
FileSalvage is an extremely powerful Macintosh application for exploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to restore files that have:
    * been accidentally deleted.
    * become unreadable due to media faults.
    * been stored on a drive before it was re-initialized/formatted.
http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id= 1
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11073082#11073082

Quartz Filter - How to use to lighten prinouts

My new color laser printer is printing a little dark. I looked at color sync and the quartz filters. I have read the instruction and moved the sliders around but I see no difference in the printng.
There is no other thing that I can change to make the print lighter.
Does anyone know how to use the quartz filter in coor sync to lighten the picture?
G-5 , 2.3 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Image src = getImage("doc:///demo/images/duke/T1.gif");
ColorFilter colorfilter = new ColorFilter(Color.color);//whatever color
Image img = createImage(new FilteredImageSource(src.getSource(), colorfilter));
Is that what you mean?? I'll try it when I get a chance.. THANKS!!

A simple and free way of reducing PDF file size using Preview

Note: this is a copy and update of a 5 year old discussion in the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard discussions which you can find here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/6109398#6109398
This is a simple and free solution I found to reduce the file size of PDFs in OS X, without the high cost and awful UI of Acrobat Pro, and with acceptable quality. I still use it every day, although I have Acrobat Pro as part of Adove Creative Cloud subscription.
Since quite a few people have found it useful and keep asking questions about the download location and destination of the filters, which have changed since 2007, I decided to write this update, and put it in this more current forum.
Here is how to install it:
Download the filters here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41548940/PDF%20compression%20filters%20%28Un zip%20and%20put%20in%20your%20Library%20folder%29.zip
Unzip the downloaded file and copy the filters in the appropriate location (see below).
Here is the appropriate location for the filters:
This assumes that your startup disk's name is "Macintosh HD". If it is different, just replace "Macintosh HD" with the name of your startup disk.
If you are running Lion or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.7.x or 10.8.x) then you should put the downloaded filters in "Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services". This folder should already exist and contain files. Once you put the downloaded filters there, you should have for example one file with the following path:
"Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services/Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION.qfilter"
If you are running an earlier vesion of OS X (10.6.x or earlier), then you should put the downloaded filters in "Macintosh HD/Library/Filters" and you should have for example one file with the following path:
"Macintosh HD/Library/Filters/Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION.qfilter"
Here is how to use it:
Open a PDF file using Apple's Preview app,
Choose Export (or Save As if you have on older version of Mac OS X) in the File menu,
Choose PDF as a format
In the "Quartz Filter" drop-down menu, choose a filter "Reduce to xxx dpi yyy quality"; "Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION" is a good trade-off between quality and file size
Here is how it works:
These are Quartz filters made with Apple Colorsinc Utility.
They do two things:
downsample images contained in a PDF to a target density such as 150 dpi,
enable JPEG compression for those images with a low or medium setting.
Which files does it work with?
It works with most PDF files. However:
It will generally work very well on unoptimized files such as scans made with the OS X scanning utility or PDFs produced via OS X printing dialog.
It will not further compress well-optimized (comrpessed) files and might create bigger files than the originals,
For some files it will create larger files than the originals. This can happen in particular when a PDF file contains other optomizations than image compression. There also seems to be a bug (reported to Apple) where in certain circumstances images in the target PDF are not JPEG compressed.
What to do if it does not work for a file (target PDF is too big or even larger than the original PDF)?
First,a good news: since you used a Save As or Export command, the original PDF is untouched.
You can try another filter for a smaller size at the expense of quality.
The year being 2013, it is now quite easy to send large files through the internet using Dropbox, yousendit.com, wetransfer.com etc. and you can use these services to send your original PDF file.
There are other ways of reducing the size of a PDF file, such as apps in the Mac App store, or online services such as the free and simple http://smallpdf.com
What else?
Feel free to use/distribute/package in any way you like.

Thanks ioscar.
The original link should be back online soon.
I believe this is a Dropbox error about the traffic generated by my Dropbox shared links.
I use Dropbox mainly for my business and I am pretty upset by this situation.
Since the filters themsemves are about 5KB, I doubt they are the cause for this Dropbox misbehavior!
Anyway, I submitted a support ticket to Dropbox, and hope everything will be back to normal very soon.
In the meantime, if you get the same error as ioscar when trying to download them, you can use the link in the blog posting he mentions.
This is out of topic, but for those interested, here is my understanding of what happened with Dropbox.
I did a few tests yesterday with large (up to 4GB) files and Dropbox shared links, trying to find the best way to send a 3 hour recording from French TV - French version of The Voice- to a friend's 5 year old son currently on vacation in Florida, and without access to French live or catch up TV services. One nice thing I found is that you can directly send the Dropbox download URL (the one from the Download button on the shared link page) to an AppleTV using AirFlick and it works well even for files with a large bitrate (except of course for the Dropbox maximum bandwidth per day limit!). Sadly, my Dropbox shared links were disabled before I could send anything to my friend.
I may have used a significant amount of bandwidth but nowhere near the 200GB/day limit of my Dropbox Pro account.
I see 2 possible reasons to Dropbox freaking out:
- My Dropbox Pro account is wronngly identified as a free account by Dropbox. Free Dropbox accounts have a 20GB/day limit, and it is possible that I reached this limit with my testing, I have a fast 200Mb/s internet access.
- Or Dropbox miscalculates used bandwidth, counting the total size of the file for every download begun, and I started a lot of downloads, and skipped to the end of the video a lot of times on my Apple TV.

Application switching not working properly

Today something strange started happening. When I try to switch to an open application, using Command-TAB or even clicking on the icon in the dock, instead of the application coming to the front, only the menu bar for that application comes to the front. When I click a second time on the dock icon, the switch completes, and the window comes to the front. But when using Command-TAB it's just left there. I can bring the window to the front, e.g. by doing a keyboard command (e.g. Command-L in Chrome to get into the address bar) but I can't just switch with one move from one window to another. This has changed today, up until now it's been fine. It changed around the same time I had a weird file corruption issue in MS Word; I wonder whether they are related? Whether perhaps it's to do with disk corruption. Anyway if you've had a similar problem let me know, I'd be interested to hear any suggestions for how to fix it (e.g. is there a way to flush preference files, and reset? I'll see whether it happens in a new user account).
Cheers
Seth

Heya Seth- I just got this wrapped up with a senior specialist; here's what we did.
Oh, little background - this happened to me too seemingly out of the blue BUT coinciding with some corruption that an Erase & Install hopefully took care of.... it was after the E & I that this began to happen.
Shut Down
Holding shift key & Power On
must hold the Shift key until a progress bar appears (can release the Power button immediately)
Time will pass
Images will show up much slower (this slows down the Quartz filters...?)
Open up apps. Now try switching.....
it will be slow but keep your eye on the Menu bar.
Working (mine did)
It's a log-in item then.
Restart - this will be sloooooooow.
Back up, Sys Pref - Users & Accounts - log-in items... I took out Growlhelper.
Worked like a charm.
Hope this helps
Cheers,
cs

Quartz Filters

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