Updated January 12th, 2012

It seems this has changed on Mac OSX Lion (10.7.x).

The good news is that the web site referred to at the end of this article has an update on this Apple issue (possibly a bug) and provided a couple of work arounds at the bottom of their web page.

A)  Open and save files with ColorSync Utility itself

1. Right click the PDF file you desire to work with and then select "Open with..."
2. Select the "Colorsync Utility" application
3. The Colorsync Utility will open up with your PDF file
4. At the bottom of Colorsync Utility status bar, you can select the quartz filter you wish to apply (ie Reduce File Size)
5. Press "Apply"
6. Save the document

or

B)   Copy the "Reduce File Size"  filter from " /Users/YourName/Library/Filters/ "  to  
       " /Library/PDF Services/ " and the customized profile will be back in preview.

Note:
On Mac OSX Lion (and possibly newer versions) - by default your Library folder is hidden from view. To get direct acces to the Library folder on Lion, you can open this folder by holding down the Alt/Option key then select “Library” under the Finder’s Go menu.

Original article (for those using Mac OSX pre Lion!)

On Macs, you can easily save any printed report to a .pdf file by using the Save as PDF option under the PDF button that appears in every Print Dialog.

However, by default, any images included in the produced .pdf file are uncompressed at printer resolution so the saved files can often be too big for emailing.

As an alternative to this, you can produce a much smaller .pdf file using the method below:

1. In the Print Dialog, click the Preview button to open the report in Apple's Preview program.
2. Select Save As... from Preview's file menu and enter the name of the file that you wish to save.
3. In the options area of this dialog, select Format: PDF and Quartz Filter: Reduce File Size
4. Click the Save button.

This will dramatically reduce the size of the saved .pdf file. In our testing this was by as much as 95%!

However, to do this, some aggressive compression is used for the images, so you may wish to check that the resulting .pdf file is not too compressed for your purposes. If so, then you can create your own Quartz Filter with less compression using the instructions found on this web site.