Big ugly black square in the middle of my picture.
Every time I open a PDF version of my image, Illustrator adds a big ugly black square right in the middle of my picture, and there doesn't appear to be a quick way to remove it.
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This really looks like artboard bounds...
When you open a raster image in Illustrator (and you do it in this case, since you have 'Tin Plate ... .png' in the tab’s header, Ai places it in a new document, which obviously should have at least one artboard. And images are usually larger than this artboard.
You have two options here:
1. Run Object > Artboards > Fit to Artwork Bounds command — this will force the artboard to 'hug' you image
2. If you don’t care about the size of the artboard (which though can make you problems later), you can hide artboards’ edges with the View > Hide Artboards command.
If these don’t help, it must be something else.
Anyway, how did you create this 'PDF version of the image'? Why? And why do you import it in Illustrator? Just want to know to perhaps advise something else.