New pages created by pasting high-quality images from the clipboard have significant graphical artifacts

[Jensen Head]

I noticed that if I paste a screenshot of text into a document as a separate page, immediately after creating such a page the image is already compressed, which is noticeable by numerous artifacts around all the letters. The original in the clipboard, of course, is free of artifacts, because the text is copied from the browser or interface windows.

I understand that image compression in PDF is a common thing, but I expected that it happens at the moment of saving, and not at all at the moment of working on the document. For example, in my case, I would prefer to perform high-quality OCR on the original image than poor OCR in the case of recognizing an image with artifacts.

In Document Properties, I did not find any image compression settings in this document (for example, to use an empty document as a template in the future). In the application Preferences, there is also nothing for the letter combination "compress". In the Image To PDF Options dialog I found the Image Processing setting, but it seems to only apply to scanned materials, not to those pasted from the clipboard. Just in case, I set all the options there to No Downsampling and No Conversion, pasted the screenshot again, and did not notice any difference from the previous paste.

On the left is the original in the clipboard, on the right is what is displayed in PDF-XChange Editor after inserting this image into the Thumbnail Pane:
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PDFXEdit (2025-06-25 15-16-56).png

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PDF-XChange Editor 10.6.0, build 396
Microsoft Windows 10.0.19045.5965

Related topics, but I decided not to disturb their creators to discuss their specific cases:
• Compression options (2019-12-28)
• Images copied/saved from PDF-Xchange are blurry and are scaled/cropped (2023-07-26)