Unwanted automatic black and white conversion?

[Guest]

Adobe is automatically converting PDFs to black and white when I open them so documents with color test and/or color images/charts/tables are completely backed out. This just started happening, I had viewed the PDFs previously without any problems. How do I change this so that I conserve the information within the PDF?

[Dov Isaacs]

There is no feature in Acrobat (or Reader) to automatically convert colors in PDF files to monochrome. Something else must be going on here.

Is this a symptom of all PDF files that you are opening or only PDF files that you are newly creating?

What are you viewing the PDF files in? Acrobat? Reader? What version on what platform?

Perhaps you can post a sample PDF file for which this supposed “automatic black and whit conversion” is occurring such that we can check it out here at Adobe?

          - Dov

[Guest]

Hi Dov, thank you for your response. This is happening only in Acrobat with all PDFs, old and new. I have been using Acrobat X Pro (10.1.16) on a Windows 7 machine, I updated Acrobat to the newest version after I noticed the problem and tried restoring the installation when updates didn't help. Reader still opens the document correctly so I have attached a shot of Acrobat (left) and Reader XI (right) to help identify the problem.

[Dov Isaacs]

I assume that these PDF files display correctly on other systems.

This is not a symptom that we have ever heard reported previously. And we certainly believe that you are experiencing this problem.

What is problematic is your concurrent installation of not only Acrobat and Reader on the same system, but even worse, different versions. Since Acrobat is a superset of Reader, there isn't any really good reason to have both Acrobat and Reader installed on a single system.

I would suggest an experiment although this may be time-consuming and a bit painful:

Uninstall any and all versions of Acrobat and Reader on your system. Reboot. Install the latest version of Acrobat that you have and any updates to that version that are available. Now try opening those PDF files. Do you still have these issues?

Another thing to look at is whether you have your Acrobat Page Display Preferences (Ctrl-K, Page Display) to Use 2D graphics acceleration. This option enables use of your video card/chip GPU if you have one. If you have this option available, try unchecking the option, pressing OK, and exit Acrobat. Restart Acrobat and see if the problem still occurs. (We have seen issues with various GPU implementations in the past. This is a longshot, but ...)

Let us know whether any of this helps.

          - Dov