Help of creating PDF's

I'm reluctant to purchase Photoshop as I like iPhoto and it is way to complicated for my liking too BUT the PDF creator within Mac is totally useless. I create big word docs with lots of high res images and then hit the print, PDF option and it actually makes the PDF file bigger so I then go and compress it and it makes the quality of the images in the now compressed PDF appalling. I need to be sending these PDF's via email as samples but have had complaints about the quality. So what's a girl to do? I've searched the net today trying to look for something cheap that will do the job to no avail. I looked at downloading Photoshop Elelments but the newest version is not out until end of March and I'm not sure if the Elements will do the job either!

Help please!