Why do my colours look so different in Windows Photo Viewer?

Seems as though on Windows 8/10 - The Photos app (default) is not colour managed, Windows Photo Viewer is. I changed default to use Windows Photo Viewer and jpg renders fine.
Guess I'll just have to encourage clients to use Windows Photo Viewer on Win8/10 and not the Photos app that comes setup by default?

cyrax83 wrote:

Seems as though on Windows 8/10 - The Photos app (default) is not colour managed, Windows Photo Viewer is.

Sounds logical. If you see two renderings from two different products previews, chances are, one isn't ICC aware.

Here's one way to ensure your browser is ICC aware (to compare to other app's):

http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html

cyrax83 wrote:

Seems as though on Windows 8/10 - The Photos app (default) is not colour managed, Windows Photo Viewer is. I changed default to use Windows Photo Viewer and jpg renders fine.

That is correct. 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. You won't see that on a regular monitor, though.

Another 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). 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.

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!

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...

Sailor Blue wrote:

FastStone is a very good FREE image viewer and basic image editor program.

I agree. However...

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.

NO, not on Windows they won't. It looks like FastStone is a fully colour-managed program because of this setting but in reality it doesn't work as it should. Don't believe me? Just use FastStone on a calibrated and profiled system with a wide-gamut monitor. Wide-gamut monitors expose all the colour management misunderstandings very well. 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.

For non-photographers it doesn't matter and FastStone / IrfanView / XnView, etc. 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 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.

peterjpromnitz wrote:

I installed IrfanView and changed my defaults to it. It is colour-managed and simple to view full screen. Much better option.

IrfanView didn't use to be colour-managed. Has that changed? Does it make use of your monitor profile?

Sailor Blue wrote:

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 shouldn't matter if either Windows or the Spyder software is responsible for loading the monitor profile as long as they actually do it. From my experience it's better to use the profiling software to do that (I use the dispcalGUI Profile Loader -- apparently the Windows calibration loader has wrong scaling and quantization. I'm not sure if that's true of Win10).

I use a Datacolor Spyder3Elite, and haven't had any problems at all with color management. 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. The screen colors show an obvious change when this occurs and suddenly colors are what they are supposed to be.

What you are seeing is the Spyder loader telling the Windows CMS about the calibration curves. But this doesn't have to be picked up by an individual program. PS, LR, most other raw converters I've tried and well-written photo viewers know that they need to translate your photo colours through the monitor profile. To quote from the dispcalGUI site:

Even non-color-managed applications will benefit from a loaded calibration because it is stored in the graphics card—it is “global”. But the calibration alone will not yield accurate colors—only fully color-managed applications will make use of display profiles and the necessary color transforms. Regrettably there are several image viewing and editing applications that only implement half-baked color management by not using the system's display profile (or any display profile at all), but an internal and often unchangeable “default” color space like sRGB, and sending output unaltered to the display after converting to that default colorspace. If the display's actual response is close to sRGB, you might get pleasing (albeit not accurate) results, but on displays which behave differently, for example wide-color-gamut displays, even mundane colors can get a strong tendency towards neon.

Let me reiterate: FastStone Image Viewer does not respect your Spyder profile; it's probably using sRGB so your Spyder profiling is wasted. As such the application can be used for a general image management (browsing, managing, copying, transferring, etc.) and it's great for that; but in my opinion it shouldn't be used for any colour-critical work (notably image editing).

I also can't comment on how the X-Rite color calibration is applied since I haven't worked with one of them. Perhaps someone like digidog, who I think has experience with both X-Rite and Datacolor calibrations, can explain how the color calibration profile is applied with the X-Rite products.

I've got the Spyder 3 and Spyder 4 hardware but use Argyll and dispcalGUI for calibration and profiling (it gives me much better results than the Datacolor software). I encourage you to try it.

sankos wrote:

Sailor Blue wrote:

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 shouldn't matter if either Windows or the Spyder software is responsible for loading the monitor profile as long as they actually do it.

Exactly. It's got to be loaded once built but other than that, the two products behave in the same manner.

I wish we could find this answer as well as I also have the same problem.

It seems to actually convert the image as I had some prints made through Walgreens and it showed the bad color adjustment.

Funny thing is that it happens on only some of the images, not all. Let's keep looking for an answer!

Hey Buddy, 
the very same problem with me, 
I really dont understand how to resolve it, or what to do it. 
if you have any solution, please let me know. 
Regards,
Nayan