Can't change system color profile under Windows 11, all of a sudden?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
June 29, 2022
3 replies
6620 views

Going in circles, all of a sudden. What should be a mundane task, all of a sudden is turning into a little nightmare. I don't suppose there is a "fail-safe" way to change the default system profile on Windows 11? I'm always using the good old "Color Management" Control Panel to change system profile, for Photoshop, but this time, it is not working anymore.

I restarted Windows many times to no avail. I disabled anything that would have to do with "monitors" at system startup. As a hint, I found some profile to load successfully like :
Wide Gamut RGB.icc or SMPTE-C.icc but not AdobeRGB1998.icc or Apple Wide Color Sharing Profile.icm.

Any help is appreciated. See attached PDF for screen captures.

Trouble_Changing_System_Profile.pdf

Windows

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NB, colourmanagement

Community Expert

Hi Roger, you are referring to the Display Profile, right? I think although Apple call that a "System profile" I thought Microsoft called it a "Display Profile" [My Device is the Display, right?]?

I hope this helps
neil barstow, colourmanagement net :: adobe forum volunteer:: co-author: 'getting colour right'
google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management

D Fosse

Community Expert

Are you sure it's not simply the same profile? Profiles have "internal" and "external" names, and they can be quite different.

Are you using a calibrator to make these profiles? Normally you don't need to load them here, the calibration software will do it for you. Changing profiles randomly is not something you should do, because the profile needs to describe the actual and current state of the monitor. That's why the software builds and loads the profile immediately after the calibration is finished.

If the profile doesn't correspond to the actual calibration targets, Photoshop can't display correctly.

EDIT: wrote that before your second post appeared, but that only confirms it.

Roger BretonAuthor

Legend

Thanks so very much for your help and suggestions.

It's really complicated, all of a sudden.

I fired up my old Windows7 box and even there, I wasn't able to designate a profile of my choice as the 'system profile'.

(I swear I always did this with complete impunity, Mac or PC)

I happen to know my way very well with color management (www.graxx.ca), I teach this stuff and have been consulting professionnally for years. I never thought I'd have to roll up my sleeves to get into programming but, if that's what it takes to get to the bottom of this (on Windows), well, I don't have a 'quick fix' otherwise. And I don't think it's a matter of "reinstalling the OS". I tried the same procedure over on a SurfacePro running Win11 and got pretty much the same result? One thing I noticed, over on the Win7 box is that the profile first needs to be "associated" with the device... From then on, there can be dozens of ICC profiles associated with the device and Windows will then allow switching back and forth between each one, pretty much the same way the System Preferences > Display > Color does under OSX.

D Fosse

Community Expert

I checked your screenshots again. When you click Add Profile, you next click "Browse". Why do you do that? It shuld be enough to select the profile and OK. Then it should be added to the main list.

All these profiles should already be in System32 > spool > drivers > color. If they aren't, copy them there.

The way it looks to me, you're trying to install a profile. But it's already installed, so nothing happens.

Roger BretonAuthor

Legend

Just for the "hell of it", I fired up i1Profiler 3.5.0 on my Win 11 system. Went through the motion to create a base monitor profile. Saved the profile at the end, did not get any error message whatsoever. I attached a screen capture which shows the profile was successfully added by the i1Profiler application (behind the scene) and "associated" with my "Device".
This is encouraging "progress"...

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