Can anyone help me with the images in the PDFs?
I generate a significant number of encounters from scratch (artifact of a home-grown high-level campaign), and every time I copy an image out of one of the Paizo PDFs, I get a ton of junk.
It looks like the transparent pixels end up black or something.
Anyone know how to copy the images out so I don't have to spend 15 minutes in the GIMP hacking at the image trying to clear up the junk?
I'd be forever grateful :)
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Can anyone help me with the images in the PDFs?
I generate a significant number of encounters from scratch (artifact of a home-grown high-level campaign), and every time I copy an image out of one of the Paizo PDFs, I get a ton of junk.
It looks like the transparent pixels end up black or something.
Anyone know how to copy the images out so I don't have to spend 15 minutes in the GIMP hacking at the image trying to clear up the junk?
I'd be forever grateful :)
I have never had this problem.
With Adobe Reader 10, you now can select images directly again and Copy/Past with no issue.
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Can anyone help me with the images in the PDFs?
I generate a significant number of encounters from scratch (artifact of a home-grown high-level campaign), and every time I copy an image out of one of the Paizo PDFs, I get a ton of junk.
It looks like the transparent pixels end up black or something.
Anyone know how to copy the images out so I don't have to spend 15 minutes in the GIMP hacking at the image trying to clear up the junk?
I'd be forever grateful :)
The image extractor in my user profile works great.
I have never had this problem.
With Adobe Reader 10, you now can select images directly again and Copy/Paste with no issue.
I've never upgraded from Adobe 8 because it was posted on here that in Adobe 9 you could no longer grab the background images, and the maps are always background images.
I'm leery of upgrading to Adobe 10 and then finding out that I lose the capability of selecting background images.
The image extractor in my user profile works great.
As for the image extractor, it does work great, but it has the same problem I do - for example, I use it on the Core Bestiary and once I figure out which of the 2,063 numbered files it created I want :) ... that file still has the messed up background. As an example, I used the Aasimar, which ended up as image Core_Bestiary1-057.jpg, which in both the Gimp and MSPAINT had junk all around the edges, just as if I'd copied it directly using Adobe Reader.
Am I really the only person out there who has this issue?
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I've never upgraded from Adobe 8 because it was posted on here that in Adobe 9 you could no longer grab the background images, and the maps are always background images.
I'm leery of upgrading to Adobe 10 and then finding out that I lose the capability of selecting background images.
I already tested it myself, they added the ability back in 10
The image extractor in my user profile works great.
As for the image extractor, it does work great, but it has the same problem I do - for example, I use it on the Core Bestiary and once I figure out which of the 2,063 numbered files it created I want :) ... that file still has the messed up background. As an example, I used the Aasimar, which ended up as image Core_Bestiary1-057.jpg, which in both the Gimp and MSPAINT had junk all around the edges, just as if I'd copied it directly using Adobe Reader.
Am I really the only person out there who has this issue?
Are you talking about the black field in the background that does not always all go away when you do a fill?
That is caused because they don't make the background transparent I think, normal I have to zoom in myself and white out the junk Pixel by Pixel with what is left over after the fill. I just do it enough to make it look ok.
Are you talking about the black field in the background that does not always all go away when you do a fill?
That is caused because they don't make the background transparent I think, normal I have to zoom in myself and white out the junk Pixel by Pixel with what is left over after the fill. I just do it enough to make it look ok.
Exactly.
Clearly they do something funky with the images in the PDF, since they're transparent in the PDF.
*shrug*
Looks like I'm stuck with the "manual fix" method, though the "threshold fill" in the Gimp makes it a little less painful.
Can anyone help me with the images in the PDFs?
Have you tried opening it in a word processor? I have NeoOffice (OS X implementation of OpenOffice) and while I don't have any of the Pathfinder PDFs, I can open the old Dungeon "web enhancement" pdfs and extract the images quite easily.
Give OpenOffice a try.
Greg
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Are you talking about the black field in the background that does not always all go away when you do a fill?
That is caused because they don't make the background transparent I think, normal I have to zoom in myself and white out the junk Pixel by Pixel with what is left over after the fill. I just do it enough to make it look ok.
Exactly.
Clearly they do something funky with the images in the PDF, since they're transparent in the PDF.
*shrug*
Looks like I'm stuck with the "manual fix" method, though the "threshold fill" in the Gimp makes it a little less painful.
I have the same problem. When i pull the image out of the PDF, it has a black background in place of the transparency. I also do the same thing with it: bucket fill the black to white and zap the pixels that don't cooperate.
I'm pretty sure this is something Paizo is doing (probably unintentionally). The reason is that other other PDFs I extract images from (using the same tools) come out with white backgrounds. For example, I've pulled images from WotC's "Dawn of Defiance" Star Wars campaign adventures with no problems. I think there's something floating around in the alpha channel of Paizo's PDF images.
-Skeld
PS: By the way, I'm using Acrobat Reader 8 on a Windows7 machine.
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Its been mentioned before that its the transparency layer of the image that causes this problem. Adobe views it as clear over whatever layer is below it(normally the background). A lot of higher end image programs treat it the same way. Not all programs acknowledge a transparency layer however, and thus they pick something to replace it with. Often this is a black background but some programs replace it with white instead. There are programs that you can select what you want the transparency to be replaced with. I believe irfan view is one of these.
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Have you tried opening it in a word processor? I have NeoOffice (OS X implementation of OpenOffice) and while I don't have any of the Pathfinder PDFs, I can open the old Dungeon "web enhancement" pdfs and extract the images quite easily.
Give OpenOffice a try.
Greg
With the Dungeon web enhancements, I can't choose the whole picture, except as a snapshot. Trying to select the image gives me a quarter of many of the maps.
Chief Technical Officer
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The part you're seeing as black is what's called an "alpha channel," which is used (among other things) for transparency. When you go from software or file formats that use alpha channels and transparency to software or file formats that don't, something along the way will decide how to convert it (depending on your configuration, it's probably either the OS itself or the application you're pasting into).
So you have a couple of choices.
First, you could try to find some software that lets you control how that transition is handled. That probably means some kind of image editing software.
Second, you could try to paste the image into a different application—ideally one that understands alpha channels and transparency, or at least one that defaults to white instead of black.
For specific advice, I can only tell you what I use: Graphic Converter for OS X. It has a function called "Flatten Alpha Channel," which sets the background to whatever color you have currently selected as the background color in your toolbox and then permanently renders the image against that color.
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Chief Technical Officer
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With the Dungeon web enhancements, I can't choose the whole picture, except as a snapshot. Trying to select the image gives me a quarter of many of the maps.
Those PDFs were created using an older PDF standard, and that image selection issue is inherent to that spec. So the good thing is that those files can be opened with really ancient versions of Adobe Reader, but the bad thing is that those images can only be extracted in pieces.
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The part you're seeing as black is what's called an "alpha channel," which is used (among other things) for transparency. When you go from software or file formats that use alpha channels and transparency to software or file formats that don't, something along the way will decide how to convert it (depending on your configuration, it's probably either the OS itself or the application you're pasting into).
That doesn't explain why an image extracted from one of Paizo's PDFs has a black background, while an image extracted from another vendor's PDFs, using the same tools and processes, will have a white background.
That would lead me to believe that *something* in the image or PDF is telling the tool to interpret the alpha channel differently.
-Skeld
The part you're seeing as black is what's called an "alpha channel," which is used (among other things) for transparency. When you go from software or file formats that use alpha channels and transparency to software or file formats that don't, something along the way will decide how to convert it (depending on your configuration, it's probably either the OS itself or the application you're pasting into).
So you have a couple of choices.
First, you could try to find some software that lets you control how that transition is handled. That probably means some kind of image editing software.
Second, you could try to paste the image into a different application—ideally one that understands alpha channels and transparency, or at least one that defaults to white instead of black.
There's more than that going on. A perfect example is the shoggoth from Bestiary 1 (not that I've used one recently or anything).
I think the problem is that while Acrobat and others can render using the alpha channel, they flatten it somehow when doing a copy/paste, because even in Gimp, I can't keep the alpha channel, and there's no single pixel color I can select that selects the "correct" pixels.
I can fiddle with the threshold values for "how close" to select pixels, but that just creates white spots in the dark areas.
Vic, if you open Bestiary 1, select the shoggoth picture, and paste it, does it come out correct for you?
If so, then I'm guessing that some combination of Adobe for Windows and the the Windows clipboard is causing it to fail for me. I know the extraction tool mentioned above fails to do it correctly.
I'm willing to go through the pain (I've done so for years), but if there were some combination of tools that could save me many 15-30 minute chunks of time, I could use that time much better reading sourcebooks and writing material (especially since I do a lot of this on my lunch hour).
Have you tried opening it in a word processor? I have NeoOffice (OS X implementation of OpenOffice) and while I don't have any of the Pathfinder PDFs, I can open the old Dungeon "web enhancement" pdfs and extract the images quite easily.
Give OpenOffice a try.
And by the way - as for OpenOffice - have you ever tried to open the Bestiary in OpenOffice? Heh. I did try, but I killed it after it froze for about half an hour. I'll have to try on something smaller.
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Chief Technical Officer
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That doesn't explain why an image extracted from one of Paizo's PDFs has a black background, while an image extracted from another vendor's PDFs, using the same tools and processes, will have a white background.
That would lead me to believe that *something* in the image or PDF is telling the tool to interpret the alpha channel differently.
-Skeld
I think it might be something in the reader, actually. While I was trying to work out just what was going on a while back, I ran into a setup where I was getting black backgrounds on some images and white backgrounds on others *from the same PDF*. (I don't recall what particular setup that was; it might have been with Preview under OS X 10.4 or 10.5.) Now, there may indeed be something in the PDF that makes different readers behave that way—possibly a result of some image manipulation that's happened in the page layout process—but not every app on every OS will behave that way.
I've since decided that it works a lot better if you never copy the images at all—I select them and then drag them to my desktop, and, in my setup, at least, that creates a TIFF file with a fully manipulable alpha channel which opens correctly in any alpha-channel aware app. (Don't know if that works on Windows.)
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I've since decided that it works a lot better if you never copy the images at all—I select them and then drag them to my desktop, and, in my setup, at least, that creates a TIFF file with a fully manipulable alpha channel which opens correctly in any alpha-channel aware app. (Don't know if that works on Windows.)
I will try that right now.
Edit: Nop Windows does not allow you to click a drag.
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You could always just use "alt + print screen" to capture the images...
After you've captured the image you want, just paste it into Paint or what have you and crop the image down...
Sure you have to do a little editing, but you don't get a black background. And I think the editing needed is easier and less time consuming than what you have to do to get rid of all that black...
Of course this is for Windows users, as I do not know how this is done using a Mac...
-That One Digitalelf Fellow-
Of course this is for Windows users, as I do not know how this is done using a Mac...
On a Mac, there is a screen capture utility called "Grab" in /Applications/Utilities.
Greg
I've never had any problems - here is what I do: I choose which image I want, then go to Tools in Adobe Reader, choose the Select and Zoom tab, then choose Snapshot Tool.
Then with my mouse, I simply click and drag over the picture until it is highlighted. Release the mouse button and the picture is automatically copied.
Then I normally go to Paint, Paste it in and edit it to fit into Word documents, maps, etc.
I currently use Adobe 9.
I've had good luck with Some PDF Images Extract. Not sure with your troubles, but it is another option.
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I've since decided that it works a lot better if you never copy the images at all—I select them and then drag them to my desktop, and, in my setup, at least, that creates a TIFF file with a fully manipulable alpha channel which opens correctly in any alpha-channel aware app. (Don't know if that works on Windows.)I will try that right now.
Edit: Nop Windows does not allow you to click a drag.
With version 8 of reader I click and drag just fine.
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Using Acrobat 8, when I select the image with Select Tool, I can drag it to the desktop. The result is a bitmap file with a black background.
You *can* us the snapshot tool to draw a square around the image (or select the entire page for that matter), then paste into another application and crop/edit. The snapshot tool screen captures (basically) an image at the resolution you've set under Preferences (I think it defaults to 75 or 150 dpi) instead of the native resolution that the Select Tool extracts. But with snapshot, you get whatever is in the snapshot pane. No black background, but you still have to edit the picture.
The question I'd like to answer is this: if I can take another vendor's PDF, select an image with Select Tool, paste into GIMP and get a white back ground ... why do I get a black background from Paizo's PDFs? That's the question. It's not a tool difference on my end (that I can see) because I'm using the same tools.
I'd love to be able to extract a picture from a Paizo PDF, copy into GIMP, and it have a white background that requires no editing on my part. That would be nice.
-Skeld
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Chief Technical Officer
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The question I'd like to answer is this: if I can take another vendor's PDF, select an image with Select Tool, paste into GIMP and get a white back ground ... why do I get a black background from Paizo's PDFs? That's the question. It's not a tool difference on my end (that I can see) because I'm using the same tools.
I addressed that above...
...there may indeed be something in the PDF that makes different readers behave that way—possibly a result of some image manipulation that's happened in the page layout process—but not every app on every OS will [make it black].
To go into a little more detail on that, there are different things that can be done with the alpha channel. Most often, it's used for straight-up transparency, but it can also be used for other effects, like "multiplying" backgrounds. And it may be that the specific effects used cause different extractor/OS combinations to behave differently. (At least, that's the best explanation I can come up with for how I was able to get images with black backgrounds *and* images with white backgrounds out of the same PDF in one of my tests.)
Really, the best answer I can give you is that you should experiment with different software (both for extracting and for image manipulation); I'm confident that eventually you will find a setup that will behave the way you want it to, every time.
I assumed Paizo was making this hard just to protect their Intellectual Property.
Anyway, I just save the page as a jpeg and then open Photoshop and lasso the image. Then, I bring it back into wherever I want to paste it. Some images need cleaning up around the edges, of course.
Disclaimer: I'm only pasting images onto my players' character sheets or handouts for our games, Paizo. I'm not stealing your stuff. Honest!
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I know this thread is 4 years old, but I found a solution which might be of use to people who have the same problem and find this thread via Google (as I did).
Extract the PDF page as a separate PDF, then save that PDF as a Word document (saving the original PDF may crash some PCs!), ungroup the desired image from the page's other images (right click the desired image, go to 'group', click 'ungroup', repeat as necessary), then just copy and paste as normal. Inexplicably, it worked! I copied it into Word (where I write up my notes), and I couldn't see it - because it was merging with the text weirdly, so 'format --> wrap text --> in line' fixes it.
Again, apologies for the extreme necro-thread, hopefully this solution helps some people! Paizo art is g#~-d#+n gorgeous, and I love it in my notes.
If I have an issue with copy/paste, I just hit the Print Screen button and then paste the screen capture into Photoshop. Crop the image to get rid of the stuff I don't want and then save.
It seems this post refuses to die!
I'll only post this here as this was the first link that google spat out when looking how to extract images from the PDFs. This video (12 minutes) massively helped:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxOBblShQbo
The description has download links to the tool that he uses. I just ran it for Gatewalkers and it worked a charm. I have all the images that I wanted with the transparency layer working properly.
