Help! White colours look Grey, even #fffff looks grey.

[Kindhearted_Genie5E81]

Hi all, when I'm openining a new document I am opting to have a white background. When the document opens the background looks grey/blue-tinted and not white. Even the colours in the Swatches and custom colour picker- the white looks grey. Not sure how to work around this issue after looking around. Any ideas? Just for reference, I do not have a filter/effect on my monitor, everything else on my screen is perfectly white. The background to this website is white, even any text/numbers/icons in Photoshop are white. When it comes to the actual documents and any colouring tools that relate to the document are off-white or not true white.

 Thanks!

[Kindhearted_Genie5E81]

FIXED IT! Ctrl+Y .... why is this a feature? What purpose would I want to have a different display of colour?

[Kindhearted_Genie5E81]

... kind of, in my colour picker #fffff still has a blue tint to it, but on the document it looks white. Going to rip my hair out!!!

[NB, colourmanagement]

@Kindhearted_Genie5E81 ~You ask Ctrl+Y .... why is this a feature? What purpose would I want to have a different display of colour?

Ctrl+Y [or CMD+Y on Mac] activates Photoshop's Soft-proofing feature.

Soft-proofing is generally used to show the user a preview of how a document will print on a certain device using the correct printer ICC profile

- you'll also note that after clicking Ctrl+Y, not only might appearance change, but also the 'filename display' at the top of the document window changes too - a suffix is added [CMYK or RGB]  to show that soft-poofing is activated.

Clicking again toggles Soft-proofing off. 

Check your soft-proof setup in the view/proof setup menu [what option is checked?] and make a screenshot please, post it here inline

in Photoshop click 'help', type in 'Softproofing' then select 'proofing colors' to read about this 

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

@Kindhearted_Genie5E81 

No, you didn't fix it by proofing to Monitor RGB. You just swept the real problem under the carpet.

This is a defective monitor profile. Replace your current monitor profile with sRGB IEC61966-2.1 (or Adobe RGB if it's a wide gamut monitor).

Type Color Management in Windows search, and change the profile here. Relaunch Photoshop when done, the profile is loaded at application startup:

This is a temporary measure so you can get back to work. The real and proper fix is to use a calibrator to make a new profile.

Bad manufacturer profiles are very often distributed through Windows Update.

Also, turn off HDR in Windows if it's on.

[Kindhearted_Genie5E81]

Thanks for getting in touch, I switched my colour profile to the sRGB one and it didn't fix anything. If I make a new document and choose a white background then it has a blue/icy looking colour and not White. When I press CTRL+Y then it changes the background to white but the colour previews in the Swatches and Colour picker menus still have a blue tint when it's clearly mean't to look white.

[D Fosse]

OK, then it's probably a GPU/driver bug. Try to turn off "use graphics processor" in Photoshop Preferences.

Did you turn off HDR in Windows?