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New Participant
February 19, 2022
Answered

How do I invert colors on document

  • February 19, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 193863 views

How do I invert colors on a document

 

No I don't mean this

 

  1. Right-click on the PDF document for which you want to invert its colors.
  2. Go to Open with and choose Adobe Acrobat Reader.
  3. Click on the Edit menu.
  4. Select Preferences.
  5. Choose Accessibility from the left-hand pane.
  6. Mark the Replace Document Colors checkbox.
  7. Select the Custom Color radio option.
  8. Click on the checkboxes for Page Background and Document Text.
  9. For each of the above options, select your preferred color.
  10. Hit OK to save your new color preferences.

 

No I don't mean the above method.

I mean how do I actually invert colors of the image of the PDF itself not the text and background

The above method only work with PDFs that can be read aloud or have editable text.

I need to invert the colors on a scanned document that reads as a image in adobe and does not have editable text. The same way you would invert colors in magnifyer but I need to do that just on the document. PS I would use magnifyer but when I put it the PDF on full screen, outside of the PDF itself is black which is converted to bright white, not helpful for viewing in a dark room which is the purpose.

Correct answer Cody28872741jiwu

Open the PDF you want to edit.

-File > Print

-Printer > Adobe PDF

-Click Advanced button

-Settings > Cutom

-(Output) on left side selected

-Output: Color: Composite Grey

-Negative Box > Checked

-Hit OK

-Print/Save new file

It will not look like it changed at first, but wait a second and it will or open the new file.

 

I had a problem with this and could not find a good explanation. Hope this helps someone.

3 replies

Cody28872741jiwuCorrect answer
New Participant
March 14, 2023

Open the PDF you want to edit.

-File > Print

-Printer > Adobe PDF

-Click Advanced button

-Settings > Cutom

-(Output) on left side selected

-Output: Color: Composite Grey

-Negative Box > Checked

-Hit OK

-Print/Save new file

It will not look like it changed at first, but wait a second and it will or open the new file.

 

I had a problem with this and could not find a good explanation. Hope this helps someone.

ls_rbls
Community Expert
March 14, 2023

@Cody28872741jiwu ,

 

This actually seems to be the correct answer. Thank you for sharing!

New Participant
February 7, 2023

I tried a lot and the only way I could achieve this functionality on Mac was to install Linux PDF readers like Evince and Okular via Homebrew. They both work well after first tests, even on Apple silicon.

New Participant
March 3, 2023

Skim has the ability to do that I believe. (Invert colors in Dark Mode in Display preferences)

try67
Community Expert
February 20, 2022

Use an image editor, like Photoshop, and then create a new PDF file from the edited images.

New Participant
February 5, 2023

Thats not a helpful solution to the problem.

ls_rbls
Community Expert
March 3, 2023

Adobe Express , both the mobile app and through online services, has many features for free that allows you to do that, including removing the entire background and adding and saving the image file with a transparent background.

 

But you are dealing with scanned images.

 

Scanned images involve many digital layers that are composed  of many other different types of data to make it appear as an single  image file readable to the human eye.

 

In which, case you should not confuse interchangeably Adobe Acrobat Pro (which is a PDF editing program) with a program that specializes in graphical image manipulation, such as Adobe Photoshop (as correctly suggested @try67), to include others like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Express, Microsoft Paint, Inkscape, GIMP, for example.

 

Scanned images should be edited and tested externally before you import them in Adobe Acrobat or you will find yourself in a world of doom for using the incorrect program.

 

However, Adobe Acrobat do have the Preflight tool which comprises a more advanced set of tools to work around similar issues under the Print Production tool.

 

The Print Production tool  is already shipped with your paid subscription of Adobe Acrobat Pro (full desktop version).

 

Also, I am not sure why are you using the recommended guidance of the Accessibility tool when that feature is not meant to handle scanned images at all.

 

In any case, if you are copying and pasting these scanned images from a web browser (or any other program for that matter) directly onto a PDF document that is viewed in Acrobat, that is also the wrong approach (unless of course, you've taken the time to edit these scanned images and test them externally with another image editing software as suggested earlier).

 

All said,  the easiest way that you should've explored first,  is to employ the Scan & OCR tool => Insert => "From File..." to perform text and image recognizition as it uploads the entire scanned image to your PDF document and while retaining the page dimensions that are already set in that PDF document.

 

Then open the Edit PDF tool and you'll be able to see which bounding boxes pertain to text or image content.

 

Right-clicking with the mouse pointing device on an image bounding box will allow you to select "Delete" from the context menu, thus removing that image's colored background that appears behind the layered text bounding boxes.

 

OR,

 

You can also select from that same context menu "Replace Image", in which case you can upload an solid color  .png image file which will do the trick as changing the background color.