Preview inverting colours

[paieye]

I have been working on a TIFF-file. I have saved it also as a PDF-file, and this post applies to both versions.

At first, all went well. Then suddenly, and without -- so far as I know -- any action on my part, Preview inverted the colours so that the text is now white, and the background black.

I spent hours trying to put this right. At last, in despair, I clicked File, Revert To, Browse All Versions. I leafed through the sheaf displayed until I found a black-text-on-white version, and am now using that.

For practical purposes, all is now well, but why did this inversion occur, and how might I have undone it ?

I am using a late 2010 MacBook Air (11-inch) with OSX 10.11.4

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Not sure how that would have happened. The only way I know of to invert colors in Preview is to move the black and white point "sliders" to the opposite ends at the bottom of the histogram in Preview > Tools > Adjust Color...

I don't know of any keyboard shortcuts to toggle inverted colors.

Glad you resolved it though,

C

 

[paieye]

Thank you for that, but, when I click Tools, I find that Adjust Color is greyed out.

If instead I click the toolbox-icon to launch the Mark-up Tool-bar, the icon for Adjust Color does not appear.

 

[honestone]

Not sure if it makes a difference, but the version of El Capitan you are running, V10.11.4, is/was not the last/latest one. It is V10.11.6. You can get the OS 10.11.6 Combo Updater from here:

https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1885?locale=en_US

You also might want to do as much disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective, as possible. Besides you doing as much disk cleanup as possible, there are some excellent tools available (both free and commercial) that can help you with that.

And, do you happen to have a backup to an external device that was made prior to the first occurrence of this issue?

 

[paieye]

Not sure if it makes a difference, but the version of El Capitan you are running, V10.11.4, is/was not the last/latest one. It is V10.11.6. You can get the OS 10.11.6 Combo Updater from here:

https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1885?locale=en_US

You also might want to do as much disk cleanup/maintenance/repairs, from a software perspective, as possible. Besides you doing as much disk cleanup as possible, there are some excellent tools available (both free and commercial) that can help you with that.

And, do you happen to have a backup to an external device that was made prior to the first occurrence of this issue?

Thank you for that.

1. Since your reply, I tried updating my operating-system. The updating-list shows 6 available updates, none of them to the operating system Another mystery...
2. I regularly run First Aid from Disc Utilities, and also CleanMyMac.
3. I do use an external drive for backing-up, but this TIFF-file arrived between my last 2 back-ups.

 

[paieye]

I have now updated my operating-system as you recommended, and am grateful to you for steering me with that, but it has not removed the difficulty with Preview.

 

[paieye]

I have now updated my operating-system as you recommended, and am grateful to you for steering me with that, but it has not removed the difficulty with Preview.

I am beginning to see how this has happened. At a time when there had been no inversion, I exported the TIFF-file as a PDF-file, because I wanted to work on it in Skim,which I find better than Preview, but which does not like TIFF-files. Preview, though, does not work properly with PDF-Files, and, in particular, does not offer the facility of adjusting their colour. To test this, I have just re-downloaded the original TIFF-file, and the text is black on a white background. More important still, Adjust Color is not greyed out, and I used the sliders to verify that it worked.

What I still do not know is how the colour-inversion came to occur in the 1st place. Thank you, helpers.

 

[honestone]

As they always say, learn something new every day! Glad you discovered the definitive reason why this happened. Also, glad to help with you getting El Capitan updated to the latest (and last) version. The Combo Updater is the best way to go when updating the OS "within the OS". And as you saw, you do not need to go to the App Store to get it (I'm not even sure if it is available from there).