Here’s the scenario: in PowerPoint for Mac, you’re setting colors accurately in the color picker. You’re entering only RGB or Hex values on the RGB Sliders pane of the color picker, because you know that PowerPoint only stores colors in RGB/Hex, not CMYK. (You did know that, right?) Nut when you windows users open the file, they see csome colors that have different values and a different appearance. What’s going on here?
You’re experiencing a problem with mandatory color management. We’re living in an era when computer manufacturers have decided they know better than us what we want. When I first wrote about this problem in 2015, it was possible to download a non-color managed panel for the macOS color picker that would give you exactly the RGB values that you chose. Mac PowerPoint: Accurate Colors – Best Practices
But those color pickers have gone away and I can’t find anything to replace them. (If someone finds one, please let me know!) So here’s my next-best suggestion:
Thanks John,
FYI, the Color Profile dropdown only exists on external monitor, not on Built-in Display for a MacBook Pro running Apple silicon and MacOS Sequoia 15.3.2
Perhaps that’s a MacBook peculiarity. We don’t have a MacBook Pro like that to test. It seems odd that Apple wouldn’t allow you to change the color profile. Here, on an Apple Silicon Mac Mini and an Intel MacBook Pro, both running Sequoia 15.3.2, we can set the color profile on all screens.
Hi John,
this actually is not a bug but a feature. Apple has been working with a deeply rooted Color Management System for decades now.
The CMS tries to calculate the delta of the numerical data within PPT (in sRGB – slightly anachronistic) towards the nowadays VERY huge color space of – especially – Apple displays. This transformation leads to changing values, yes.
Using sRGB as the displays color space should take out the need for this transformation – as you have described. The limiting factor here is the very confined color space sRGB. I guess things are a WAY messier in Windows.
I usually define color values via Photoshop and its profiling tools. But: You need to know where you are coming from and where you’d like to go to. Color Management is not trivial; never was. Back in the day people were happy if their displays could cover sRGB. Those days are gone. That is good; but it makes things a little more complicated.
Thanks for your comment. I’ve been writing about color management since the 90s (Color Me Curious: ColorSync 2 Review), so I’m familiar with the benefits in a workflow that uses it correctly, as Adobe does. Unfortunately, Microsoft Office and PowerPoint often have not, though they have improved in recent versions.