After I OCR drawings they appear much lighter than before the OCR was performed. How do I fix this?

Hi Virginia,

You did not tell us which version of Acrobat you are using, what your OS is (and which version), what kind of scanner you are using, and what kind of document you are trying to scan.

However, what it sounds like is that your image is being "averaged out."

What I mean by this is that all visual sensors, whether from a scanner or a camera, always try to guess what the proper exposure should be. An analogy of this is if you take a photo of snow, the the snow will appear darker than it does in real life and if you take a photo of a black steam engine, the steam engine will appear a lighter gray than it should be.

In both of those two cases, adjusting the exposure of the image should be mostly adequate to fix things but paper images have other issues.

IF you are on a Mac, and scanning through Acrobat, than you are using Apple's "Image Capture" which is dreadful scanning software. If you have a scanner than that scanner should have it's own software installed on your computer as well. Look at this blog I wrote for Adobe that details how to get good clean scans to create a PDF

https://forums.adobe.com/community/creativepipeline/blog/2018/01/22/scanning-clean-search-able-pdfs

Please let us know if this helps you or not. If not, please supply answers to the questions I have at the very beginning and a screenshot of your document.

Good luck