RGB / CMYK in Pages

If CMYK color model is your document output color profile preference, don't use Pages. It is loyal to sRGB regardless of what you do in the Pages document. You probably want a more professional word processing (e.g. Word) or page layout application (e.g. Affinity Publisher) for retained color profile output.

The Pages color chooser lets you believe you are setting CMYK colors by choosing one of these options:

It used to be that the CMYK sliders would allow you to individually set a new color if you selected them first, but in Pages v13.2 on Sonoma 14.2.1, they are useless for that purpose, unless you switched from an existing RGB slider color — a poignant departure from past Pages versions on older operating systems.

The CMYK colors will be set in Pages until you save the document, or export to other content. When you reopen that Pages document and click on the text that you think you assigned as CMYK, the color chooser opens to the RGB slider. If you switch to the CMYK slider, it will show what it did before you saved the document.

If you export that Pages content to PDF, and use ExifTool to view the PDF detail, the Color space data will be RGB, and device model and profile will each be sRGB.

This is a very frustrating issue for those who love to use Pages on an iMac. I've used Pages for 15 years and the older versions of Pages never had an issue with RGB and CMYK. Having been in the graphic arts community for nearly 40 years I found Pages would do 95% of everything I needed from a page layout application and it was easy to learn and easy to use. I've use everything from Aldus Publisher to Pagemaker to Quark Express to InDesign. I found most of the applications as they evolved cumbersome and complicated. I've created content on an old Mac mini running OS 10 for over a decade and it has worked seamlessly. I still use it on small simple projects. Recently being forced to upgrade — my new iMac — running OS Monterey and Pages 11.2 I've found this issue with CMYK to RGB most frustrating. There is simply no reason for Apple not fixing this in an update. It is so bad that at times just clicking on the CMYK button and entering a value will swap back to RGB and never allow you back into the CMYK sliders without closing and reopening the document. I'm having my printer tell me all my CMYK colors sets in the document are being converted to RGB on output and then converted back to CMYK during his ripping process of my PDF and yes it will and does shift color. In most cases not enough for a client to tell but if you are matching corporate colors in a dropped in image or vector file you may not match color exactly. This is a cruel joke by Apple.

Pages was originally designed and remains a consumer-oriented application that was not designed as a substitution for the professional layout and color management features found in Quark, InDesign, or now Affinity Designer. It is a free application that Apple is very unlikely to invest large dollars in making it into a competitor of the aforementioned applications. Not and keep it free…

There was no cruel joke intended by Apple. You are simply trying to economically achieve expected results with the wrong tool for a professional result.

You are welcome and best wishes with Affinity Publisher.