No, unfortunately they are not. Foreground and background color are not the same. Like I said, look at the decaying zombie tile. It has a yellow background as evident by what is generated, but it doesn't look like it has a yellow background when shown on the statusbar.

Maybe it automatically selects the "darker" variant of the color? As in, yellow->brown, ltred->red, etc. Hm. Might need to do some shufflling around in the color selector in AsciiTiles.