Colors appear washed out?

[hmedcalfL23J7]

*Please refer to attached image*

The company I work for has specific colors we use for elements, line types, hatching, etc. All of a sudden all of the colors on my screen appear to be washed out. These colors are supposed to be vibrant and stand out. It's almost as if I've accidentally toggled a setting that has caused this to happen. I know it's not my monitor as the correct colors appear as they should under the line styles. This isn't project specific either as I've opened many of my previous projects to find that all of the colors are faded/washed out. I've been through Revit's settings and I can't figure out what I did for the life of me to cause this to happen?

[barthbradley]

Hey, try this. Close Revit completely, delete the Revit.INI file and then restart Revit and open that RVT file.  

Help | About the Revit.ini file | Autodesk

[hmedcalfL23J7]

Reinstalling Revit fixed the issue for me. If anyone can think of a solution for future reference or if anyone else comes across this issue please provide the correct solution

[barthbradley]

out of curiosity, did you try deleting the INI file?  If that were to have fixed it, it would provide a valuable clue. 

...for example, see what these INI setting do? Some of them look like they might be related to your issue.  If so, the "correct solution" might be just reverting the INI back to its default settings.  The ones that you're using now.  

https://help.autodesk.com/view/RVT/2024/ENU/?guid=GUID-37DAECBA-58AA-4937-942A-3230631AA11E

[hmedcalfL23J7]

I'm sorry, I didn't receive this response until after I reinstalled Revit. I appreciate everyone's time in trying to figure out a solution. If I come across this again I will try that and update this forum with a successful solution

[barthbradley]

I'm betting the solution is what I said, but we'll never know now.  😉 

[barthbradley]

Could have been due to a Graphics Override applied to the View via the View Phase Filter. Even if you don't Phase Construction, the View still uses a Phase Filter.  

[hmedcalfL23J7]

*Update* - This problem appears to occur when updating Revit to the 2024.2 Release from November 8, 2023 as it happened right after updating through the Autodesk Access program.

I've tried deleting the Revit.INI file method and that doesn't fix the issue. It just creates a new .INI file where all of Revit's color settings are remembered.

It's not an issue of having Halftone either. I have to assume that this was either intentional by AutoDesk in the latest update or it to be a bug.

[barthbradley]

Have you checked Halftones/Underlays under Additional Settings on the Manage Tab?  

[hmedcalfL23J7]

I can understand why you would think this would be the culprit, however this is not the case. That is a project specific setting. This means that even if I had accidentally adjusted these settings in the manage tab on this specific project, these changes wouldn't apply to a project, say I did last week or last month. It would only change that setting on that project. I've used Revit as a job everyday for 2.5 years and this is completely new to me. I've never had an issue such as this until I updated Revit to the latest version. Take for instance today, I've been working in Revit all morning, and I got a notification that an update was available. I immediately installed the November Update and after going back into a project I was on, my colors were once again washed out. I'm not sure what the update has altered but it has to be the culprit.

[barthbradley]

Does this happen in New Projects? With other Templates? 

[hmedcalfL23J7]

Yes, for example I tried creating a new window family. All of the reference planes have washed out colors immediately. All line types and object styles don't reflect the correct color presentation in model space

[hmedcalfL23J7 · Accepted solution]

It's been a while so I wanted to post my findings on this issue in case anyone else likes to assign colors to objects or linework. It appears that following a particular Revit 2024 update and now with Revit 2025 the reason that my colors appeared "washed out" is because the color codes have been reversed for lack of a better term. Therefore, if you had linework assigned to a bright, vibrant color then your linework will actually display in model space as dark despite how the color appears in the line styles. The fix for this is that you have to go through all of your colors and invert the illuminacity value of the color profile. For example, if your luminacity was set to 180 before then you will need to set the value to 60 instead. (180 is 60 away from 240 (Max Luminacity) as to 60 is to 0). No idea why this change was made as it screws up the colors appearance if you have them assigned. I get a lot of people just stick with the default black and white but my architecture firm uses colors to identify dimensions from normal linework and different objects categories have different assigned colors. It's just easier to pickout what you're looking for when in floorplan view.