Inconsistent colour rendering in Publisher

[Unlikely Moniker]

*If Publisher isn't showing you colours as you expect, try opening and closing it a couple of times and restarting Windows first before bashing your brains out on the colour management settings.*  

Working on a Publisher document this morning I noticed the colours were way off what I expected compared with the doc elements I'd done in Designer.

As an example, here are two colours - Cyan and CMYK 14.0.100.0 (aka "fluorescent yellow") - as I expected from what I was seeing in Designer:

But here is what Publisher showed with EXACTLY the same colour management settings as Designer for the document and the programme itself:

The point is not whether either of the above are "accurate" renderings of Cyan or 14.0.100.0. The problem is Publisher disagreed with every other app on my PC including Affinity Photo and Serif Page and Draw Plus.

I tried every combination of colour profile and document intent available in Publisher. None of them made a discernible difference except for changing the doc format to RGB/8, which improved the Cyan noticeably but not the yellow-green.   

Publisher exported the intended colours (i.e. as displayed by Designer) as images and PDFs (CMYK and RGB). Those files displayed correctly on other monitors and devices, with only the slight variations you'd expect. But it wouldn't display correctly on the monitor. 

I did the two docs shown in the screenshots to report the problem, then went out for a meeting.

When I came back, signed back into Windows and reopened Publisher, all documents now displayed colours consistent with Designer etc.

So it was "just" a glitch - albeit one that cost me half a morning's work, making Affinity a very expensive choice if you want to look at it that way.

But looking around, I notice other users reporting "washed out" or otherwise incorrect colours. 

For that reason, I am reporting this behaviour as a bug in 1.7.3.481

 

[Gabe]

Hi @Unlikely Moniker,

Welcome to the forums. 

Have you calibrated your monitor or using a custom ICC display profile? 

[Unlikely Moniker]

I have calibrated the monitor using the Windows' internal tool. Colour preference for RGB is sRGB IEC1966-2.1. in all Affinity and legacy Serif apps.

That gives acceptably predictable rendering of RGB outputs across the devices and monitors I've got access to.

The issue is with Publisher seemingly randomly deciding to render colours wrongly - in some sessions until I restart the PC. 

It hasn't happened again since I made the post.

All the same, I now regularly open the afpub file with Cyan and Fluorescent Yellow to double-check Publisher is behaving as expected. 

I'll update this thread if it happens again. Likewise, If there's no further recurrence over the next few weeks, I'll put it down to a one-off glitch with my Windows and update.