Typeface in pdf looks washed out/light

When I convert a document to PDF the typeface looks washed out. Recently I was looking at a document on line and wanted to copy a paragraph. When I tried it a window came up saying that the page needed to be scanned/converted before i could copy from this document. I said "Ok". Ever since then, instead of the typeface being clear and solid, it's washed out and lighter looking. What happened, and how do I correct this problem?
I have AA XI

Hello,
Yes, the iMac's monitors are very good. They are among the best in the Apple LCD line.
But, Macs have a very distinctive difference in their video appearance. They will look less sharp when compared to a PC.
The difference is in how the Mac displays it's video. Basically, as I understand it, this is a visual perception based on the Mac's use of Anti-Aliased screens / fonts.
So, it does take some getting used to if you are new to Macs.
I've gotten accustomed to it. But, there is a noticeable difference in how the Mac displays video and how the PC displays it.
I have connected a number of PC monitors to my Macs, and the visual perception is the same as it is using a built-in Mac monitor. The PC monitor looks sharper and more defined on the PC than it does when connected to a Mac.
The difference is in the Mac OS and how it displays or renders it's screen and fonts. So, it's not the monitor.
Now, you can go into System Preferences (under the  menu) and then go into displays and tinker with the calibration settings and such.
Also in System Preferences is the "Appearance" pane. You can go in there, and towards the bottom is the "Smoothing" option. You can adjust those options as well. Note that the smoothing options don't take effect until after you restart.
So, there's a couple of places you can tinker to try and tailor it to look closer to your preferences.
I hope this helps.
Let us know if you have other questions.
P.S., if you'd like, go ahead and click the "Helpful" or "Solved" buttons on any of the posts / replies above if you feel they were helpful or adequately answered your question.

Similar Messages

Possible solution to PDFs looking washed out/colors faded

I decided it would be easier to post this as a new thread in itself than to reply to each and every thread related to this problem.
I searched the forums to try and find a solution to images looking washed out/colours looking faded after exporting from InDesign CS3 to PDF.
After looking through the forums I came to the conclusion that the reason the images looked faded was because I have objects with less than 100% opacity in InDesign so if you also have similar settings this may work for you also.
When exporting from InDesign, under the Output tab I changed the Colour Conversion setting to Convert to Destination.
Other than that I left everything else as it was.
This solved my blacks looking washed out, particularly my fonts which had become a sort of grey/brown colour.
However I noticed that on the pages with images after the pages that had objects with varying transparencies, they still suffered from looking washed out.
The next step I came across purely by chance: Opening the PDF using Acrobat, under the Advanced tab I chose PDF Optimiser and noticed that the Transparency option in the sidebar hadn't been checked like the Fonts and Image options had.
So I checked the box and set the Preset to High Resolution and clicked OK.
It took a minute or so to Save the new file and once I opened it, the richness and contrast of the images had returned, if anything slightly over saturated but a lot better than the washed out/faded appearance of the previous document.
Hopefully this will work for a few people out there having the same problem.

I've actually responded a few times to others on the forums regarding images looking washed out/faded in Acrobat 8. I thought I'd pass that information to you here just in case it helps. In those cases, the images that had that appearance either had transparency applied or interacted with it in some way. However, if the file was viewed with the Output Preview dialog open (under Print Production tools) the colors appeared correctly. They would also be correct if the transparency was flattened. As it turns out, there was a bug in Acrobat 8 that affected the onscreen display of those images that interacted with transparency or had it directly applied and the transparency was still "live" (not flattened). This was fixed in the update to 8.1. If you are running 8.0 you might want to try updating to 8.1 and see if that helps?

Pdfs are washed out

i have generated a pdf, and just recently the colors seem to be muted. it prints fine but the pdf is washed out to the level its hard to read.

It may vary. I have seen some strange results from OFFICE 2007, where there apparently are some hooks built into the MS software. You might try with OFFICE 2003 or OpenOffice. I have used OFFICE 2003 for some things and gotten excellent results, where OFFICE 2007 created issues. I know that it is OFFICE 2007 since I also played with different versions of Acrobat for Office 2007 and got the same strange results, where things were fine with OFFICE 2003. There may be an issue with the
I just created a new PDF from PPT 2007 and the results were looking fine. For folks to be able to comment more effectively, they need to be able to duplicate what you did and I am not sure that can be done with the information you have provided. Specifically, what job settings file did you use in the Adobe PDF printer, etc.

Why do my images look washed out...

Why do my images look washed out after I have worked in Photoshop CS6 and saved them in Finder? I have been a Photoshop user for a while now and have never experienced this problem. It started 2 months ago and no one can seem to tell me why or how to fix it. I am a professional photographer and I have clients waiting on their images but I can't send them looking as horrible as they do. My workflow is: drag and drop an image from iPhoto or Finder to Photoshop. I change things like levels, contrast, image size and use the healing too. Then I save to Finder so I can upload to dropbox or to website or burn to a DVD. Now when I save the image the thumbnail looks washed out, without color and looks horrible!!! I don't know if my photo files are corrupted or ? If I open the image in Photoshop or Bridge it looks fine. I would be grateful for any suggestions or explanation. Things were working just fine, but not now.

Examining the image direct from the camera of the child on the beach, using http://regex.info/exif.cgi there is a small embedded thumbnail (with black bars top-and-bottom to letterbox it to the LCD aspect ratio), and a small preview probably used for zooming in on the camera LCD screen, and the fullsize jpg image all contained in the one JPG file. All three of these seem to have identical histograms other than the black-bars causing a dark peak on the thumbnail image, but otherwise the shapes of the histograms and the position of the peaks from light to dark are the same.
In other words the full-size JPG and the embedded preview and thumbnail all seem the same other than size so the darkened version seen in Finder is not coming from the camera. The one issue the above website reports is that the camera JPG has a color-profile tag (name of the profile) but does not actually contain the color profile, itself. All other versions of the image have an actual embedded profile not just the name in a tag. It is possible that this is confusing Finder into assuming a different profile or gamma curve for the image that sRGB warrants, but most all camera images have this issue so I wouldn't expect a Mac to show images from all cameras as too dark.
It is a mystery to me why the Finder preview looks darker, but at least in the one side-by-side provided, it does, and is different-looking than all other representations of the image from what I can see.
At the beginning of this thread you said you were worried the photos coming out of Photoshop were washed out and had bad colors. From my perspective, what comes out of Photoshop looks the same as what comes out of the camera, so only Finder has it wrong. Are you seeing the darker image anywhere else besides Finder (and perhaps iPhoto which we don't have a screenshot of)?
Most importantly does the image you see on screen in Photoshop, while you're making adjustments, look dark like the pre-PS Finder thumbnail or does it look lighter, like the post-PS Finder thumbnail and all the images on DropBox?
If more than just the pre-PS Finder thumbnail is darker then you may have a monitor calibration issue that needs to be addressed, otherwise just ignore the pre-PS Finder thumbnail when evaluating if the image needs any adjustments and assume they are all ligher than the Finder image.
BTW, I tested for a sRGB vs AdobeRGB mismatch, and if an sRGB image is assigned an Adobe profile then the colors become more intense but the whole image does not become darker so that can't explain what is happening.

Photos looked washed out when played through a TV....

I have a new G5 iPod and a 60gig Photo. When plug then into the same TV with the same cable (s-video and audio) the pictures from the G5 look washed out. The iPod Photo colours look "brilliant" and are all but identical to the original digital pictures and when shown on my iMac 20" screen.
Is this because of the video aspects of the G5 and the "corners" cut to get the unit size down (hence no fire wire).
Please advise, I feel like returning this and sticking to the Photo.
Thank in advance.
David

Got a refund today
Will wait for better resolution iPod to be released. The Photo still rox

My RAW files look washed out jpegs are OK

My RAW files look washed out, in camera I introduced warm colours by setting it on cloudy and set to vivid. They look great in other programs, how do I retain the original colors?

Buddy, the issue is that Photoshop Camera Raw / Bridge don't use the parameters you set in-camera at all. It may seem odd that it doesn't, but that's the way it works.
The idea is that these software tools give you full control over literally hundreds of factors that go into your raw conversions, and trying to emulate the presets on the camera just doesn't make sense.
You need to save new Camera Raw Defaults to deliver color you like in new exposures you haven't opened before. Check especially the Camera Profile setting in the Camera Calibration tab in Camera Raw. Adobe does provide some options that will get you close to what the camera does, then you can tweak the settings further.
For what it's worth, it's not wrong to want the color to match, especially if you like the color the camera delivers. I've created Camera Raw Defaults for my own cameras that provide a very good match between the in-camera color and what a new exposure looks like when first opened in Camera Raw... I don't always leave it that way, though.
-Noel

Icons/Folders/Thumbnails look "washed-out" in Tiger. Is there a setting?

Hello.
After installing Tiger I notice that the icons for the folders and the picture thumbnails look washed-out or grayed-out, not fully colorful as usual. I looked at all the Finder preferences but can find nothing to change it.
It's not so bad for the folders on the desktop but I really need to be able to see picture thumbnails clearly.
What setting am I not setting??
Thanks!!

From your description, it sounds like the "Finder" setting to display all items including those that are invisible has been enabled. In earlier versions of OS X, the behaviour was that only normally invisible items would appear "grayed out" (a useful indicator of its status), whereas normally visible items would have the regular appearance. This changed in "Tiger", where everything appears faded with that setting, something I would consider to be yet another example of the trend in erosion of usability of the OS X "Finder" that seems to accompany every revision.
As far as I know, there is no built in GUI way to change that setting - it likely became enabled through the use of some third party utility. Such utilities are an annoyance because, while they generally do no harm, they do nothing more than set "hidden" settings that are a part of OS X. As such, the effects of the utilities may persist, even after they themselves have been completely removed from the system. Then it is left to the user to try to figure out what setting was modified, or to remember what app they may have downloaded then uninstalled months in the past.
Your options are unfortunately limited, you presumably had chosen to display hidden files in the past for a reason - under 10.4, normally visible items will appear "washed out" when showing invisible items and I'm not aware of a way to change that. On the other hand, disabling the setting should cause visible items to appear with full opacity, but you would no longer be able to see the "invisible" items. The setting can be stored in a number of places, but for starters, to disable it, try launching "/Applications" > "Utilities" > "Terminal.app" and entering these commands:<pre>defaults delete -g AppleShowAllFiles
defaults delete com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles
osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to quit'</pre>After entering the commands, restart the "Finder" by clicking on its "Dock" icon.

My 2009 imac display looks washed out

can anyone help me my mid 2009 imac color looks washed out take a look for your self
if anyone knows how to fix please tell me

Hi jono from opunake,
Thanks for the question. Let’s take a look at your accessibility preferences to see if the Display contrast has been increased at all:
OS X Yosemite: Display pane of Accessibility preferences
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH18394
- Matt M.

Special Problem- Washed out light PDFs created from Revit- any ideas why?

This may be a very specialty type question… I have posted it for my Revit discussion folks… but it is to do with Adobe’s software… so I thought I would try here as well.
The issue is occurring when creating PDFs from Revit 2010.
The issue is that when we print to PDF the pen weights that we see when the PDF is created do not match the look of the Revit Pen weights and shades are worse… they are lighter… in both cases they lighten up… which gives us a washed out drawing…
Hope that someone has seen this and may have a quick fix… This is really been a big issue… and it would be great to have it fixed…
Hope there are some Revit users on your form… or perhaps someone who may have an idea why Adobe may act so oddly with Revit…
Thanks…

Oh... forgot to note... we are using
Adobe reader 9 Pro

Just upgraded to FCP7, colors look washed out, more saturated than in FCP6

We just upgraded the office to FCP7. Users are now complaining that colors look much more over exposed, washed out, different than they were displaying in FCP6.
Also, a bug shows when you play a clip, it looks lighter. Hit pause, and it displays darker.
What's going on? We're all on apple cinema displays calibrated to 2.2 television gamma.

I've FCP7 (Snow Leopard) and 6 (Leopard) running side by side and I don't get this problem.
I'm assuming you did a fresh install of both OSX and FCP7 when you moved from one to the other ? I find this is really the only way to guarantee stability.
Sorry if I'm stating the obvious (you don't give many details) but you might also try trashing the prefs and doing any available updates.

How come start up screen colors look washed out.

Hi,
I tried to change the background for the login startup screen on my iMac. I noticed that the colors from my image appears faded.
When I look at the image in other origram(ie. preview) the colors are what they should be.
So what is OS X(Lion) doing to cause the colrs to look this way? And is there a way to fix it?
Thanks and I look forward to your reply.
...Bruce

I had this problem with my R705 too. It has to do with one of the bloatware that is already installed from the factory. The reason that I say this is because after I put in a ssd and did a clean install without any of the bloatware, I don't get the washed out screen effect anymore. Now which one of the bloatware is responsible for this, i couldn't tell you.

Titles look washed out

I have ended a video with simple credits: white Gill Sans lettering on a black background. These titles show on the computer as crisply and vividly as I had intended. When I create a DVD and play it on the computer, they are still crisp white-on-black. When I play the DVD through a TV (any TV of almost any size: CRT, LCD, Plasma or LED), the whole of the video shows perfectly, but then come the end credits and the white Gill Sans had turned into a dull, washed-out gray. This makes it difficult to read.
This is frustrating, but what makes it doubly annoying is that similar white-on-black title scrolls and cards from broadcasters show clearly and crisply on these same TVs.
Obviously, broadcasters are doing something that I am not (or vice versa). Can anyone suggest where the problem might lie and what the solution is to these ditchwater whites?
Thanks in advance.

Hello Tom:
1. The format is AIC 29.97 1920x1080i60.
2. I'm exporting as a QuickTime ref file.
3. The resulting file looks perfect: 100% white on 100% black.
4. I'm exporting to Compressor 3.5.2, which I set to burn the DVD after encoding has finished.
Given the symptoms (only on a TV does the white text go dull), normally I would have assumed that the fault lay in the TV, but this look of 30% white on 100% black happens irrespective of which DVD player I use and which TV it's connected to. I have now tried half a dozen player/TV combos thanks to friends and family. Only on a computer monitor is white text on a black background truly 100% white.
Strangely enough, whites in the video images are perfectly white. This problem becomes apparent only in white text on a black background.

Pantone uncoated swatches look washed out

I'm somewhat green on the print side of things. I understand that pantone coated vs uncoated are formulated for printing on coated or uncoated papers.
But what I'm not getting is, why do the uncoated color swatches in the illustrator color book look so washed out? The coated swatches look very vibrant. Is this just a visual approximation of how the colors will look after absorbed into uncoated paper? They just look so dramatically different, I can't really match a rich color I'm trying to reproduce with any of the uncoated swatches (for a projecct being printed on uncoated paper stock).
Any help is much appreacited!

In terms of the physical PANTONE guides, when comparing colors on coated vs. uncoated paper, the ink and formulation are identical (although the ink film thickness, or density, can vary somewhat between the two papers). The visual difference between PANTONE 185 C, and PANTONE 185 U, for example, is caused entirely by the surface characteristics of the respective papers.
In licensed software applications, such as Adobe Illustrator CS6, the colors in the coated vs. uncoated libraries are an attempt to simulate onscreen the differences caused by the different papers. However, the other individuals in this thread are entirely correct - you should always use the printed PANTONE product as the final arbiter of color correctness. Any computer display, even one that is properly calibrated and profiled, will exhibit some degree of variance with respect to display of color in general, and PANTONE colors in particular. You should never fully trust the onscreen display of color.
Please do not hesitate to contact us directly at [email protected] if you require further assistance.
Best regards,
John Stanzione
Manager - Technical Support
Pantone, LLC

Placed TIFF looks washed out compared to original in Photoshop

I have a TIFF file created in Photoshop with Adobe RGB (1998) color profile. It looks vibrant and great. When I place it into my InDesign document, however, it looks drab and washed out. InDesign color settings are:
Working Space: Adobe RGB (1998)
Color Management Policies: Preserve embedded profiles (for both RGB/CMYK)
When placing, I selected 'Show Options' and tried using both Adobe RGB (1998) and Use Document Default. Nothing seems to make any difference.
This occurs on both my Mac Leopard 10.5.5 and Windows XP SP3 machines.

Sorry - additional info:
InDesign CS4 6.0.3 on both computers
Photoshop CS4 11.0.1 on both computers

Photos uploaded to Picasa after being adjusted in Aperture look washed out.

I imported color pics (RAW and JPEG) from my Nikon D70 to iPhoto. I brought them into Aperture, adjusted the shadows and uploaded them to Picasa (using the Picasa Web Albums Uploader, not the "Aperture to Picasa" plugin. The pictures on Picasa are totally washed out. This doesn't happen when I adjust in iPhoto and upload to the same place. I then downloaded the Kodak (ofoto) uploader. Same thing- washed out, almost gray photos.
Thanks.

View>>Onscreen Proofing
Is it turned on?
View>> Proofing Profile
What is the profile set on?
DLS

Typeface in pdf looks washed out/light

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for