Once I reverted to the Windows default color profile and let the Spyder software make the change everything was fine again. That totally screwed up the color management. The screen colors show an obvious change when this occurs and suddenly colors are what they are supposed to be.Ī couple of years ago just to see what would happen I did change the default Windows color calibration. I make no changes to Windows and what happens is that the default Windows default color profile loads first then the Spyder software starts and changes the color calibration. I use a Datacolor Spyder3Elite, and haven't had any problems at all with color management. I can't comment on using a wide gamut monitor but with a normal (~sRGB) monitor if you are telling windows to change the monitor profile instead of letting the color calibration software take care of that then yes, you are probably correct. It is better to use the basic Windows viewer (not the metro app) or Picasa, which display images correctly if you set your system right, or something like FastPicture Viewer (a commercial product), which is what I would suggest to any photographer. are sufficient for their needs but I'm really surprised that photographers who calibrate and profile their displays keep saying that those viewers are properly colour-managed - they are not.
It becomes "oversaturatedly" obvious that FastStone does not make use of the monitor profile when showing you the preview of your image and that's a basic colour-management mistake.įor non-photographers it doesn't matter and FastStone / IrfanView / XnView, etc. Wide-gamut monitors expose all the colour management misunderstandings very well. Don't believe me? Just use FastStone on a calibrated and profiled system with a wide-gamut monitor. It looks like FastStone is a fully colour-managed program because of this setting but in reality it doesn't work as it should.
If you turn on the color management using the Settings>Settings>CMS>Enable Color Management System command then most images that have an embedded color profile will display correctly.
See also this thread on another forum and also this one, where even such gurus as Schewe have to ask questions about those cryptic Windows settings.įastStone is a very good FREE image viewer and basic image editor program. Incidentally, the WCS viewing conditions setting was a mystery to me and for a long time I set it to ICC, until I noticed that this was appropriate if my calibration and profiling were for the D50 white point, whereas in my case it is D65, so the appropriate setting is the sRGB one! It's very difficult to get any info on the web when it comes to what those settings really mean in Windows: I don't think they apply when you use properly colour-managed applications (raw converters, PS, FastPicture Viewer, etc.), yet setting them correctly would be ideal. You won't see that on a regular monitor, though.Īnother thing I noticed in your Windows CM settings: in the Advanced tab the setting for your Device Profile is sRGB, whereas *I think* that to be on the safe side you should also choose here your monitor profile (the one that you get after doing the hardware profiling of your monitor). This becomes really apparent if you happen to have a wide gamut monitor: the non-colour-managed sections of the Windows system are really a pain to get used to with all the oversaturation of all the metro apps, most video players, etc. I changed default to use Windows Photo Viewer and jpg renders fine. Seems as though on Windows 8/10 - The Photos app (default) is not colour managed, Windows Photo Viewer is. It's a profile from the spyder 2 hardware calibration So what the heck is going on? Why do pictures look like ass in Windows Photo Viewer? Is it not rendering the jpgs properly? Notice how there is no colour shift it looks normal - you can compare to the lightroom screenshot: Next here is the same windows jpg export as a dropbox direct link Lightroom left, jpg export right in windows photo viewer: As an example, here is a screenshot I've taken with the snipping tool I then view the e3xported jpg in the standard Windows Image Viewer and they look totally different.
I then export as jpg to sRGB (as they are going to be used by clients on the web/social media etc). Now in lightroom, I see a certain colour and I edit to that. The colour profile has been applied to the video card properties. The 30 inch monitor has been colour calibrated using a spyder display.
I am running Windows 10 and a Dell 30 inch monitor.