Some PDF documents appear black or in inverted colours

[Ravi_MR]

Hi,

This week (probably after Mac OS 15.2 update) I have noticed that some colour PDFs appear weird - in black or inverted colours though I have not changed anything in accessibility settings.

Problem is in :M1 iMac 24 inch and Macbook Air 13 inch
OS: Both have been updated to 15.2
Affected files: Some PDF documents which are colour scans of old books - downloaded from Archive.org or Hathitrust. Not all such PDF documents are affected.
Apps: Mac native preview app and PDF expert app (which is what I use usually). The problem is not there in Foxit PDF editor - the same documents appear as normal.

Screenshots attached of (a) Preview app (b) PDF Expert app and (c) Foxit PDF editor...

Has anyone else faced this?
Wondering if this is a bug after OS update or any setting I need to change?

 

[Reggy Celly]

I'm having the exact same issue. M1 Macbook, MacOS 15.2
No idea how to fix it.

 

[Ravi_MR]

I'm having the exact same issue. M1 Macbook, MacOS 15.2
No idea how to fix it.
View attachment 2463599

Then mine was not an isolated case. So I guess we must log it as a bug and flag it to Apple. Will try to find out how to do that..

 

[gilby101]

Some PDF documents which are colour scans of old books - downloaded from Archive.org or Hathitrust

Can you give us an example?

 

[Ravi_MR]

Can you give us an example?

Here you go :

 

[BrianBaughn]

The macOS update has screwed up Preview's ability to properly render PDFs created with the tools that the Internet Archive is using…maybe because of some sort of compression method their tools use. This also affects any apps that use the macOS PDFkit framework.

I was able to create a workable PDF version of the file by viewing it with Firefox and printing to a PDF. However, that file ended up being 31.1MB instead of the original 2MB. Uploading the Firefox-printed PDF to smallpdf.com got the file down to 3.8MB.

File a bug report with Apple.

 

[Ravi_MR]

The macOS update has screwed up Preview's ability to properly render PDFs created with the tools that the Internet Archive is using…maybe because of some sort of compression method their tools use. This also affects any apps that use the macOS PDFkit framework.

I was able to create a workable PDF version of the file by viewing it with Firefox and printing to a PDF. However, that file ended up being 31.1MB instead of the original 2MB. Uploading the Firefox-printed PDF to smallpdf.com got the file down to 3.8MB.

File a bug report with Apple.

Thanks for the investigation and feedback. Will find out how to report a bug later tonight, and then do it. If you know, please share.

 

[mike-601]

I'm experiencing the same issue, also with certain PDFs from archive.org.

 

[IvyKing]

Here you go :

That rendered just fine (i.e. not negative) on my M4 Mini running MacOS 15.2 on Firefox, got the negative with Preview.