Question

Copied Photos are washed out when placed or pasted in Illustrator

Forum|Forum|6 months ago
November 21, 2025
2 replies
1287 views

Hi,

When I copy and paste a photo into illustrator the colors in photo are completely washed out. I haven't made any changes to color settings and this just started happening in the last week. I unistalled and reinstalled the app and still the same thing. I attached a screenshot of the actual photo what it looks like in ai at left.

I messed with RGB/CMYK settings but nothing changed. Please help!

Pia

Others

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

Are you working in RGB or CMYK? Where do you copy it from?

Can you show what your color settings look like?

Can you check if your document color profile is the same as your working profile (Edit > Assign Profile can show if they are different).

I

P

piah49457975Author

Hi Ton,

My color setting is CMYK and as far as I can tell it's the same in Assigned Profile as Document Color Mode. I don't use my files for printing, just sending to a factory for viewing as a pdf and photos need to be clear, and as you can see in the initial screenshot they look almost transparent. Thanks for your help.

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @piah49457975,

Thanks for reaching out. If you're using macOS, please try recalibrating your monitor for sRGB (https://adobe.ly/4rhUOZ9), restart your computer, and then relaunch Illustrator to see if this resolves the issue.

Also, kindly synchronize colour settings across Adobe applications by following the steps here (https://adobe.ly/3XKcIpU) and share your observations.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Anubhav

B

Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

This behavior happens in a completely new document? When you select the image how does it look in the Appearance panel? Is there anything extra going on there? Or is there something applied to the layer where the image resides?

P

piah49457975Author

Hi Bobby,

Yes, this happens in a completely new doc as well as existing. Image in the transpanrency tab looks normal and transparency is set at 100%, see screenshot. I'm just copying a section of a jpeg and pasting in ai, been doing the same for years and have not changed settings. Thanks for your help.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded