Image has multiple pieces

[kevinr]

Scenario: We get a pdf from customer. I use the Touchup Object tool in Acrobat to open the images in PSD to edit and save back to the pdf. This works great. However, sometimes, larger images are tiled into smaller parts. What makes this happen? Is there a setting in InDesign my customer can use to prevent this tiling?

[DavidMa]

It's called atomic regions. It splits into multiple images when some form of transparency is used.

check out this for more info:

Adobe - Creative Suite CS3 tutorial : Transparency for Print Output in Adobe Creative Suite 3

[kevinr]

Is there something that can be done to prevent it when exporting? Having Atomic regions slows our editing down considerably.

[Stephen Marsh]

Kevin, do you require flattened PDF files in your workflow, or are you willing to accept PDF files that contain live transparency? The latter should avoid the issue and the images should arrive intact.

Stephen Marsh

[Lukas Engqvist]

I think this is one of the main motivators to move from PDFx1a to PDFx4. Ofcourse if the image is a placed add that at some point in its "life" has been flattened there is little you can do, possibly, you can edit page, to move the image to Illustrator there select all the objects and Rasterise them, (or export to PSD) that would merge them, and then continue from there, but it is much more work to reconstruct the file that has images converted to tiles than aviod the tiles. I would probably contact the customer and tell them what image needs to be fixed, since the risk to just fix it would be too high.

What is the issue you are trying to fix btw? If it is ink limit, try using the colour converter in Acrobat pro 9