22 November 2007

Colour management, Vista and nVidia

A while ago I bitched a little about colour management in Windows Vista, and how my system would discard the loaded profile from ColorSpyder after about 30-60 seconds.

I must denounce my accusations towards Vista. It turns out to be caused by video cards having the nVidia geForce 8600 series chipset, and is the same on XP and Vista systems. The nVidia control panel which installs with the drivers has its own way of managing colour. Due to a delay in startup, the Spyder profile will load first, and then be replaced 20-30 seconds later by the nVidia application. The bad news is that the nVidia software does not support ICM or ICC profiles. There is only a crude, manual adjustment of gamma and colour balance. Solution is either to get a new graphics card, or resign to reload the Spyder profile manually on each startup.

Wonder if any of the other graphic chipsets are safe for manual colour management. ATI and Matrox are the first that springs to mind. Maybe Santa has any qualified advice? Hmmm... probably not.

Update 24. November 2008:
A little freebie bit of software to the rescue: Startup Delayer. I made a post about it here.

1 comment:

Clusen said...

I had the same problem. Now I use "StartUp Delayer" which loads the SpyderPro profile about 20 seconds after startup. It's not perfect, but it works :-).