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I made PowerPoint template on PowerPoint 2010 for PC and everything seemed to be just fine.

But when I opened it on my Mac (PPT 2011), I could see the background color was wrong. So I tripple checked the RGB-values on the background and they was OK.

So I tried to write some text over the background with the SAME RGB-value on the text as on the background. There was clearly a difference here. It seems to me that the text got the correct color and the background is wrong.

I tried to do the same thing on a blank presentation (and blank document in Word) and I could reproduce the same result.

Why is there a difference in the background color and the text color when they both have got the same RGB-value?

effico
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4 Answers4

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It doesn't seem to be a profile issue, as the colour appears differently between a native solid colour filled shape or background and text filed with the same, manually entered RGB value. No colour is sampled from a placed object.The text just appears darker and is closer to the visual appearance of the RGB colour in Photoshop on the same screen. But it's a mystery why text and solid filled shapes appear differently.

As a workaround, by using the equivalent HSB picker values in photoshop, entering them in PowerPoint and changing the Saturation setting by 1 point, the solid fill matches the text colour. But if you go back to the PowerPoint 'more colour' slider, the values are listed differently than those entered before. Also if you set the text to the same HSB value as you changed the solid fill, it goes darker again by 1 Saturation step.

The problem here is that, if a colour theme is to be saved, 2 values for the same visual target colour between text and solid fills will be required. Unfortunately negating the purpose of a consistent colour theme.

Hope this helps.

CommonSense
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This has probably to do with color profiles, probably on your mac, but it might be on the PC of course.

I've had this in the past, used color profiles on my mac with Internet Explorer (about 10 years ago). That resulted in strange effects. I made screenshots of websites I created and opened in IE, that had completely different colors from the same colors in Photoshop. I ended up disabling color profiles.

So you should check if color profiles are active on one of the computers. Disable them, and then see if this problem disappears.

SPRBRN
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It's a peculiarity of the MacOS way of handling color correction.

This page on my PPT FAQ site explains what's going on and how to fix it:

Colors appear different on Mac vs PC PowerPoint http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ01173-Colors-appear-different-on-Mac-vs-PC-PowerPoint.htm

Steve Rindsberg
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The main issue appears to be that Office on the Mac only works with standard colours. As soon as you start using custom colours it is very broken and renders the backgrounds differently to the pictures even with the same RGB numbers. This even happens if you create the picture using Mac Office, save it to PNG and bring it back in.

The only way I can find to make this work is to create the PNG with a transparent background. This way you aren't matching colours at all. On a PC Office handles colours fine but on a Mac it's very broken with seemingly no fix, only a workaround.

Matthew Williams
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Jonathan Whiteman
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