I’ve been running Vista on my development computer for several months now. On the whole I have been quite happy with it. Things have worked well, stability has been equal to XP, speed (once I got more RAM) has been better. One strange thing I had though was that pictures in the Windows Photo Gallery looked a little strange.

After a little searching for how to change the background color, I found other people with this symptom describing it as an off color, yellow tint, orange or yellowish tinge, beige, cream colored background which, shows through the picture itself, distorts the colours, or bleeds through pictures. In most situations the problem went away in slide show mode. This was an annoying issue, making me avoid looking at pictures whatsoever in Windows Photo Gallery. This wasn’t that much of an issue because I do not use photos or pictures often on my development machine. But before I was going to install Vista on my other computer where I view photos constantly, I needed to ensure that I would not have this issue.

The solution is found here.

The problem ended up being the incorrect usage of a color profile set by a Windows Update for the monitor driver. This commonly occurs on Samsung monitors. My monitors are Samsung’s. The monitors on my other computer are LG’s and this issue did not occur. Fortunately, the fix is very simple. Just remove the color profiles for the monitors.

Since I have dual screen setup I did one monitor at a time to see if it worked. The article said you must restart your computer. I did not find this the case. Simply restarting Windows Photo Gallery was enough. The difference was quite obvious when I put the picture split across the two screens.

Adjusting the other monitor color profile fixed it completely.

Below is the color management dialog with the color profile set for the monitor. This needs to be removed. To get to the color management, right click the desktop, select Personalize > Display Settings > Advanced Settings… > Color Management tab > Color Management…