topic Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/.. in Documentation

Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Pavel_N — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 10:17:19 GMT

For JPG images that are inserted into Layout as an external drawing, significant color changes occur after publishing to PDF via Publisher.

In Archicad Layouts, JPGs appear the same compared to the source file, but the PDF export from Publisher is significantly color-shifted (both in terms of color tone and image brightness). The output is completely unsatisfactory, a PDF with embedded images cannot be presented or printed seriously in this state.

I did a small test to demonstrate the problem. In Layout, I created colored rectangles as fills, made a printscreen of them and inserted a printscreen next to the original. I attach the test result in the attachment.

On Windows everything is all right, Its only MAC Silicon issue. The issue also occurs in AC27 MAC and maybe in older versions?

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Lingwisyer — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 02:01:57 GMT

My first thought was that it had to do something with the bitdepth that the images are being published at, but your first three colours being straight RGB should not be affected at any logical bitdepth... I assume you have dug around in the PDF publish options?

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Karl Ottenstein — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 02:25:09 GMT

I don't have an answer, but can suggest where to look...to understand it but not to solve the issue:

JPEG images use the sRGB color space. When viewing on-screen, you are seeing the current Mac display color profile's interpretation of those colors. When the PDF is created, the color space for the embedded image could be changed to RGB or Adobe RGB etc....and when viewing... even if the RBG color codes are identical, the PDF viewer could be using a different color profile to interpret that color space. For example, InDesign let's you look at colors with the monitor's color profile, or the printer profile for a particular paper.

What I could not see, and why my post is really not helpful, is any way on the Mac to select the color space or the color profile for a PDF. Certainly using File > Print from a Layout and then the Save as PDF option has no color options. And, using Publisher to publish to PDF... those PDF settings also don't have settings for embedded color space or embedded color profile. It's very interesting that it works properly on Windows, but it seems it would take some detective work to figure out why this is happening on Mac... but without any settings options for creating the PDF, it would only be academic to figure out why its happening. Unless of course it is something Graphisoft can fix.

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Karl Ottenstein — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 02:31:19 GMT

I Googled a bit and found these PDF export settings for Affinity Publisher which do indeed let you choose the color space and profile for the exported PDF there. I wonder if that's something we should be adding to the Archicad wishlist...other than you said everything works fine on Windows without these extra settings...

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Lingwisyer — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 02:32:52 GMT

Ah, you are thinking that maybe the actual colour space of the jpg is being changed to be different from that of the rest of the PDF? Sounds like a possibility.

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Pavel_N — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 09:37:39 GMT

Can I ask you to test and replicate the problem on your Mac computers? Just insert any JPG image into Layout and export it to PDF via Publisher and compare them? Do you see a similar color shift as I do?

If I use print to PDF directly from Layout (native Mac PDF printer) instead of publishing, the colors are correct. So it's a problem within the ArchiCAD export.

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Pavel_N — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 09:33:22 GMT

The reasoning is probably correct. But I'm not sure that the differences in color would be so huge in the case of swapping commonly used color spaces. I guess the problem lies in the incorrect interpretation/deformation of a specific color space by ArchiCAD.

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

vlahtinen — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:55:00 GMT

Yes, we're having the same issue and also using Macs.

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Karl Ottenstein — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 14:18:09 GMT

Yes, I'll try later today (just morning here now) ...unless someone else confirms sooner... but am glad you posted that File > Print > Save as PDF did give the correct colors as that was what I was going to suggest as a troubleshooting step for Publisher's PDF. Thanks for that.

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Karl Ottenstein — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 14:24:41 GMT

I agree that sRGB to RGB or Adobe RGB should not cause this issue. But, let's say that the Archicad PDF publisher converted to CMYK (probably a more likely color space for eventual printing)... then sRGB to CMYK and back to sRGB could indeed give different results if the conversion protocols were not symmetrical. Of course, none of C, M, or Y can be represented exactly in RGB either, but I'll try adding those colors along with the RGB primaries when I test your workflow after I wake up some more...

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Pavel_N — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 15:34:52 GMT

Thank you for your answer. I would like to point out that printing to PDF via File > Print > Save as PDF can only be used as a short-term rescue solution, because I was unable to print more than one drawing at a time from Publisher this way. You can print multiple drawings at once only from Layouts, if you manually select individual drawings before each print. I am not sure that it is possible to print multiple formats in one document to PDF within one export (for example, the entire document will only contain A3 format). So it looks like the Publisher function is completely disabled for MAC users if we want usable outputs in PDF. So we basically have Archicad START Edition but at a higher price 🙂

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Karl Ottenstein — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 16:16:12 GMT

OK. Head spinning a bit from experimenting in the mad science lab. Bottom line is that it has nothing to do with your Mac being Silicon vs Intel, but everything to do with (a) using the built-in screen capture on a Mac and (b) the 3rd party PDF driver that Graphisoft uses does re-interpret the color space in the color profile.

After verifying that I see what you see... and measuring the colors with the built-in Apple "Digital Color Meter" (which I encourage Mac users to take advantage of when trying to color-match anything)... some Googling shows that graphic artists have problems with the macOS built-in screen capture function as it captures colors as interpretted by the active monitor color profile. I verified this by changing my monitor profile to several others (which were ugly but anyway) seeing that the Digital Color Meter indeed measured different RGB values for the red that was supposed to be (255,0,0). Wildly different in fact.

In reproducing your screenshot issue - pure color fills, screenshot, drag screenshot back in as a placed drawing... I saw a similar (but different) color shift as you did. Not exactly the same as my monitor profile would not match yours. Opening the screenshot in Preview and using Digital Color Meter gave me the same colors as appeared in the layout in Archicad.

Digital Color Meter can use multiple color spaces. In Native Values, the red wasn't even close to (255,0,0), but in sRGB ... even though the pen is set to pure (255,0,0), the meter reads (255,1,0). Instead of (0,0,255), pure blue reads as (8,0,255). Pretty close anyway...why not exact is a small mystery.

On the drawing that was saved as a screenshot ... the PNG image (I set my screenshots to save as PNG instead of JPEG for better quality) and the placed drawing have identical - but different - colors. The pure red swatch became (235,8,17), green did not shift... (1,255,0), and blue (15,0,255). Almost no shift to CMY and gray. That difference from yours is purely up to the color profile of my monitor. Totaly weird... but this is on Apple, not Graphisoft. In the Graphic Artist community, the advice is to take any screenshots received from clients... all of whom would have had different monitor profiles... and export them from Photoshop to jpegs with the option to convert to sRGB. That seemed to work.

Anyway... that explains ONE part of the color shift.

Part TWO of the color shift is the 3rd party PDF exporter that Graphisoft has incorporated into Publisher. It, too, takes the monitor profile into account and converts the colors - whether we want it to or not... of images that contain both a color space and monitor profile. And, unlike image files, I haven't seen a way to undo this conversion. Somewhere in that PDF export, there may be a setting that Graphisoft can tweak to have it not do profile color conversion and to leave the pure RGB/CMYK values that are in the Layout. Like you, I consider this conversion of colors a bug. And, because this software is only part of the Mac version of Archicad, that's probably why you don't see this happen under Windows.

To clarify: in my experiments, the pure RGB solid fills exported to pure RGB in the PDF whether I used File > Print >Save as PDF or Publisher. But, it was the screenshot image that had its colors shifted...not just upon creation... but upon Publisher generating the PDF....as if the monitor profile was applied again. Save-as-PDF did not shift the placed image's colors again.

Summary...

1. Shifted colors of screenshots dragged into Archicad are an Apple problem and the colors have to be restored using a Photoshop export if placing screenshots onto Layouts with accurate colors is important.

2. Shifted colors of images containing monitor profiles in Published PDFs is a Graphisoft problem and they have to work with their 3rd party PDF routine provider to address that. Any colors generated by pens in Archicad do publish with their desired color values. The issue is only images contained on the layouts.

...at least in my analysis this past hour 🙂

PS. If you do a Get Info (cmd-I) on the screenshot jpg (png for me), you'll see both the color space and the color profile such as the below screenshot. When I changed my monitor to different profile settings, that showed here... and the color shifts differed. I have no idea why Apple thought this was a good idea.

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Karl Ottenstein — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 14:58:12 GMT

... [strange - original reply did not appear for me even after refreshing]

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

David Maudlin — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 11:57:39 GMT

@Karl Ottenstein wrote:

Man, I just spent a half hour responding in detail with the results of an hour of testing... and my reply is gone and this Khoros platform didn't save a draft. 😞

Karl:

I am seeing your longer reply just before this one, don't know why you cannot.

David

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Karl Ottenstein — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 14:59:17 GMT

Thanks, David. It's there for me now, too. I refreshed the page etc yesterday and it would never appear... I'm thinking that I might have used some words that caused it to go to the automatic spam quarantine and a moderator released it. Magic 🙂

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Barry Kelly — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 04:43:54 GMT

If only you were still a moderator, you could have seen. 😃

It wasn't me, but I too assume it was quarantined, maybe because of all the technical detail?

I don't see any links or anything else that would quarantine it.

It can be a little sensitive at times.

Barry.

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Pavel_N — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 17:40:58 GMT

Your Sherlock-like approach is incredible, thank you very much for your maximum care with the answer!

I would not have discovered the first part of the problem with printscreens on the Apple side myself. Anyway, I only used prinscreen as a tool to test the problem, fortunately I usually do not insert prinscreens into AC during normal work. So this part does not bother me too much, but I am very glad that I know about it thanks to you, this knowledge will certainly come in handy for some associated graphic work.This discovery would also explain why I had to do a printscreen of the monitor again on the test computer with WIN, because the colors in the source PLN file containing the prinscreen from the Mac had very slightly shifted colors.

Regarding the second part of the problem, thank you for confirming that this is an ArchiCAD bug. Actually, I find it strange that no one from the Mac community responded earlier, the bug is already visible in AC27 and probably in older versions. Personally, I am really unhappy that the visualizations inserted into the layout are completely out of the original, especially the darkening is immediately noticeable.

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Karl Ottenstein — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 22:53:42 GMT

Glad that helped. Do note that as far as color shifting happening... beyond screenshots... it just means that the images you are placing on layouts include the monitor profile. So, to workaround the color shift, you should convert the image colors in Photoshop (or similar) to eliminate the embedded monitor profile - same as with a screenshot.

While the re-interpretation of the embedded monitor profile is definitely a bug in the Publisher PDF exporter as implemented by Graphisoft, I wouldn't call this a "critical bug" as you do in your subject line as I don't recall the issue being raised by anyone else. (There has been a reported color shift in JPEG and some other image exports in the Visualization forum over the years, but that again is related to color spaces and color profiles.)

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Pavel_N — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:32:50 GMT

I did the test again without using printscreen, so as not to involve Apple's bugs in the problem.

I created the right part of the image by exporting the left part from AC using Command+P > PDF > Save as PDF. I converted the PDF to JPG in MacOS and then inserted it as an external drawing into AC. Then I published the whole thing using Publisher to PDF. Compared to the previous test, slight deviations to other shades has almous disappeared, but the changes in darkness remains above the tolerable limit. It is very strange that the shift in darkness is different for each shade, some are almost identical, while the further away from the basic RGB shade the more pronounced the deviation.

I would like to disagree that this is not a critical issue. Many of us use AC as a tool for architectural work, where layouts contain a large number of visualizations and other images, and this is a really big problem not only for interior projects. I looked at the released AC 28 hotfixes, no fix was important for me (I didn't notice any stability problems either), fixing this problem is absolutely crucial for my work.

export resultprinscreen of AC interface before publishing

Re: Color inconsistency of published PDFs on MAC - Critical bug in AC28/27/..

Pavel_N — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 10:00:11 GMT

I am adding a test with more colors, basically all are affected except for the basic RGB colors, where the deviation is tolerable.