The imposed file is already the object
A lookbook PDF is not a draft in a layout app. It is the sheet the tutor, the printer and the client will open. What usually arrives is not that purity: a page shot sideways on the library bench, a blank from the scanner, two covers, the contact sheet in the middle of the plates. The temptation is to launder the whole volume through Word and hope the folio comes back. It will not. The other temptation is to send it as-is “so nothing is missing”. Something is missing: tact.
Edit PDF on Pdfmira is the light table for that mess. You rotate, you drop, you reorder. You do not rewrite captions. You do not rebuild a baseline grid. You look at the volume as a sequence of plates, then you take a new PDF. Guest flow. The file on your disk stays. Ours expires.
Rotate is a right angle, not a miracle
Rotate still exists as its own spread: 90, 180, 270. Inside edit, the same physics. Perspective — the trapezoid of a phone shot — is another job. If the plate was photographed on the diagonal, rotating gives you a diagonal in another direction. Reshoot, or live with an honest crooked still. Do not ask the bench to invent a drum scan.
If only plate 4 is upside down, rotate that plate. A global turn on a mixed signature is how you invert the pages that were already true. Creatives already know this in the darkroom. The converter should not pretend otherwise.
Drop the leaf that does not belong
The identity scan that fell into the export. The blank verso. The duplicate colophon. Delete pages is the surgical cut when you already know the numbers. Edit is the table when you need to see the sequence. Reader numbers, not the folio printed after the contents page. Page 1 is the first leaf in the file.
This is not redaction. We do not black out a name in the middle of a caption. If the brief is anonymisation, you are in the wrong studio. If the brief is “don’t send the intern’s passport with the lookbook”, dropping the leaf is enough and decent.
Reorder is the only layout that matters now
Cover, plates, colophon. Or chronological contact sheet. Merge is for signatures that are already separate PDFs. Edit is for one volume in the wrong order. Do not merge three times “to be safe”. Choose the gesture. File order is volume order; the bench does not guess a narrative from filenames.
After the sequence reads, compress if mail or an LMS will choke. Judge the large preview. A lookbook that muddies skin is not “optimised”; it is spoiled. Keep the heavier master for the shop. Screen stock for the grid on the site — that is another essay, the WebP covers.
Then, if the proof needs a name
When the volume is the volume you mean, sign can take the visible ink. Not before. A signature on a discarded cover is a story you do not want to tell a client. Visible ink is not eIDAS; the next plate in this issue says so in a headline. Paperza, same controller, will do this errand in fifteen seconds without a running head. Stay on Pdfmira when you need to see the spread first. That is the product.
Controller: Giannico Costantiello, VAT 08910530727, street in Turi. No stars. No yellow icon clone. The index lists the live spreads. Laboratory Office remains a salvage, not a layout tool.