Print-Ready Book PDF Upgrade

I have a 180-page interior PDF for my history title “They Never Surrendered, The Lakota Sioux Band That Stayed in Canada.” It was laid out in Microsoft Word back in 2012, converted to an adobe PDF file and printed through Lightning Source. It is currently a 2026 Adobe PDF and has recently been accepted by Lightning Source, although with warnings about image quality. The text file itself is serviceable, but the twenty black-and-white photographs that were embedded at the time are soft and sit well below today’s 300 DPI standard.

What I need now is a clean, press-ready PDF/X-1a that meets Lightning Source’s current specifications. You will first pull each image from the existing PDF, upscale it to true 300 DPI, convert it to proper grayscale (no hidden colour channels), then place it back in position so that the page geometry and running pagination remain unchanged. While you are inside the file, please take care of a handful of small text tweaks I will mark—nothing major, just minor kerning and line spacing fixes; and possibly make the type darker. It is printing light on the page.

I will supply:
• The original interior PDF
• A list of page-level text corrections
• Lightning Source’s specification sheet for reference

Deliverables I am looking for:
• A print-ready interior PDF that passes Lightning Source’s pre-press check on the first upload
• A folder with the restored 300 DPI grayscale images for my archive
• The final submission file for Lightning Source including the restored photos.

Acceptance is simple: if Ingram/Lightning Source flags no issues and the images look crisp on the soft proof, the job is done.

If Adobe InDesign, Affinity Publisher, or another professional tool is your weapon of choice, that’s perfect; I am flexible on the workflow so long as the final file meets PDF/X-1a requirements. Let me know your turnaround time and any questions you have.