Color problem in Window 7

Ever since I upgraded to Window 7, I've noticed that there are problem with the colors on some applications. For example, picture on website looks good but once I download it and view it on Window Photo Viewer or Photoshop, the quality become realy bad, there's banding in gradient and such. Another example is with picture from my camera. I have a Canon 400D and when I load the images from the camera with "Zoom Browser EX" the picture viewer that came from Canon, everything looks like how they are supposed to look. But if I open the image with Photoshop or Photo Viewer it has the same problem. Strangely, Paint and Word doesn't have a problem with the images either. I'm not sure if it's also happending in games or not.

Here's an image of what I'm talking about.



Anyone know how to solve this problem?

What monitor do you have?

Either way, the answer is almost certainly a corrupted monitor color profile. Both WPV and Photoshop take color profiles into account and most web browsers don't.

There's a known issue with color profiles for Samsung monitors; if you have one of those, just delete the default color profile and you should be good.

I have a Dell 2209WA, whis is an ips pannel I believe.

How do I remove the color profile? I opened up "Color Management" in the control Panel, there's the default profile for the 2209WA but the option ot remove it is greyed out.

the color isn't so very different, it looks like a gamma issue to me. have you disabled adobe gamma? although i'm not sure if that explains the similarity between the windows viewer and ps...worth a try.

It's a color profile issue.

I have the same monitor at work but on Vista and when viewing the image that I attached on the first post. The image on the left seem fine, the two in the middle and on the right seem darker but there isn't banding or looking corrupted like at home.

How do I delete or change color profile in window 7?

Arainach said:

What monitor do you have?

Either way, the answer is almost certainly a corrupted monitor color profile. Both WPV and Photoshop take color profiles into account and most web browsers don't.

There's a known issue with color profiles for Samsung monitors; if you have one of those, just delete the default color profile and you should be good.

Click to expand...

I was playing around with this and a friends display calibrator a few days ago.

While true that IE8 does not, our good friend Firefox has for quite a while. The current 3.6 certainly does, and I think it was added sometime during 3.0.x.

Irfanview does not seem to.
Paint.NET don't think did either.

I uninstalled the monitor driver and that seem to solve the problem, but after I rebooted the driver automatically install again. Is there anyway I can change the profile to something else or stop the driver from automatically installing?

I've had this problem for years with Vista/7 and my 2407. It's definitely a Color Profile issue, but I can't find the damn webpage I used a while back to fix. It's somewhere in Color Management -> Advanced -> System Defaults -> Can't remember. Something about changing the system default to using the correct profile.

I'll keep looking for the fix though. Also, if you calibrate your monitor, that seems to fix it too.

Edit:
Here's a couple things, not sure which one I used:
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-general/29665-yellow-pictures-windows-photo-gallery.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939395/en-us
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-general/69609-colors-off-windows-photo-gallery.html#post378724

press windows key
type "monitor color" (no quotes)
open "change advanced monitor color ..."
Check "use my settings for this device"
Click "add"
Choose an ICC profile (e.g. sRGB)
Click "OK"
Click "Set as default profile"

Report back

Thanks for you help guys. I found a solution by myself that worked but when I get home, I'll try the other solution you guys suggested to see how it turn out.

Tawnos, I tried that but it didn't add a profile, maybe I missed a step or something.

Anyway, what I realized was, if left by itself, Windows 7 will detect what kind of monitor it is and reinstall the driver from Dell if all I did was uninstall the driver. The problem was the Dell driver was the cause of problem, so what I did was find a Generic PnP monitor driver and install it after I uninstall the Dell driver. This way Windows 7 will detect that there's already a driver present and wont overide it.

Thuban said:

Ever since I upgraded to Window 7, I've noticed that there are problem with the colors on some applications. For example, picture on website looks good but once I download it and view it on Window Photo Viewer or Photoshop, the quality become realy bad, there's banding in gradient and such. Another example is with picture from my camera. I have a Canon 400D and when I load the images from the camera with "Zoom Browser EX" the picture viewer that came from Canon, everything looks like how they are supposed to look. But if I open the image with Photoshop or Photo Viewer it has the same problem. Strangely, Paint and Word doesn't have a problem with the images either. I'm not sure if it's also happending in games or not.

Here's an image of what I'm talking about.



Anyone know how to solve this problem?

Click to expand...

Two things are going on here. First when you download these images are you copy/pasting them into photoshop or downloading them and opening them? If you copy paste them and they were tagged srgb (and you were viewing them in a color managed browser) you will see a color shift since the the color profile is missing and they are essentially getting double color managed as photoshop re assigns the profile. If you are downloading and opening them and finding a color shift then it sounds like you are viewing them in a non color managed browser and photoshop is rendering them into srgb space causing a shift, this is likely the correct color being rendered by a really bad monitor profile causing the banding and other issues.

In short, all of these problems are being caused by moving in and out of color managed applications. The poor image quality is sort of a separate issue from the color shifts and its likely that you just need to profile your display.

AlecMoody, the image in the screenshot is a jpeg taken with my Canon Xti and transfered to the computer. It's the same image opened in three separate programs at the same time then I resize the windows to take a picture of all three.

Anyway, I solved the problem by uninstall the Dell monitor driver that Win7 automatically installed and repalced it with a Generic PnP monitor driver.