So I just wasted a couple of hours tying to solve an issue I've been having with windows 7's colour management (I should have spotted the solution sooner really). I recently bought myself an x-rite colormunki and have just re-calibrated my displays using it, opting to create icc v4 (latest version) profiles. So far so good, everything looks great in managed applications such as photoshop, lightroom, firefox etc. and everything looks 'normal' otherwise.
Now I take an image in photoshop and export it to a jpg with sRGB colour space... in 'windows photo viewer' which claims colour management it now looks god awful (hugely over saturated, pixelated and and with far to much contrast), next I open it in an un-colour managed application - it looks alright, but blacks are clipping heavily and it's still got too much contrast. So now I re-open it in photoshop - looks perfect (as it does in all other colour managed apps except windows photo viewer). If I disable my colour profile or view this image on another computer it looks as it should, only on this pc with my icm profile active sRGB images I've converted from a wider colour space won't display properly in any application except for colour managed ones that aren't microsoft-made.
Anyway, I googled this issue and the only thing that really came up (and it kept coming up) was a link to Microsoft's own help which is essentially "My colours look weird - solution: delete your monitors colour profile" - great fucking solution! That's in no way a solution, that's a bad workaround that's of no use to anyone since the only time I can see someone using a colour profile on their system is if they installed one (it's buried about 5 menus in to the control panel settings).
So anyway, long story short it turns out if you use an icc v4 profile instead of an icc v2 profile this is what happens - windows starts doing weird colour corrections to non-colour managed apps (why??) and windows photo viewer isn't compatible with icc v4 and completely screws up. BAH! |
