Windows 8 ICC Profile - Weird Behaviour

I created an ICC profile using my Spyder2.

I loaded it, set it to be the system default, etc.

Now, whenever I maximize a window, I see a change in colours. Then, when I minimize everything and am staring at my desktop, after a few seconds I get another colour shift.

Basically, it seems to me that the ICC profile is being applied for a maximized window, then being "turned off" when everything is minimized and you're just on the desktop.

This is for both my laptops (a Dell and a Clevo).

Any ideas?

 

I don't think this is caused by the new ICC profile, otherwise the color cast would always show.

Have you installed the latest graphic driver?

Also, give it a try deactivating the graphic driver in the startup of your msconfig. Sometimes it happens that the graphic card tool loads slower than the Spyder Tool on startup and will therefore overwrite the calibration profile.

 

Couldn't I just uninstall the Spyder Tool? I use the Windows software to load the ICC profile.

 

Yes, you could. I've calibrated the display on my tablet with a spyder 4 and provided the ICC profile to others who applied it through windows without any issues.

Also, certain applications tend to ignore ICC profiles, games are a good example of that. I have to run games in "fullscreen windowed" mode if I want the ICC profile to kick in, otherwise, it just reverts back to the old one if the game is just set to fullscreen. You may be running into some instance similar to what I described.

 

Well that won't help a lot.

First of all, you need to recalibrate your screen every month, due to the lifecycle of the monitor changing the backlight and the color filters. You can't be installing and uninstalling each month.

Furthermore, even if it is exactly the same model, using your profile on other machines can even be worse than having an uncalibrated display, due to the first reason I mentioned (lifecycle of monitors) and that the manufacturers not always use exactly the same technology for the same model (for example, there are notebook models where the display panel is not always from the same manufacturer, they need to change from time to time to lower production costs.)

So the best solution is to leave the Spyder Tool installed and deactivating the graphic card tool in the msconfig.
Here is the FAQ example for ATI graphic cards: I have an ATI video card in my Windows computer and my monitor profile does not seem to be active. - Powered by Kayako Fusion Help Desk Software

For NVIDIA cards, I think the program to deactivate is called "nwiz.exe" or directly something with "nvidia".

 

Further research indicates this might in fact be due to the Intel 4600 adaptive brightness/auto-dimming feature.

 

That would be especially true if you do color important work, but if it's only to get the display to look a bit "better", just using the .icc profile might get the trick done (or it may not). You can always remove the icc profile and go back to Windows defaults if it doesn't work anyways.

It's definitely not as good as leaving the spyder utility there, but it might get the job done for people who just want to fix a shift towards a certain hue on their display.