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Snow Leopard ruined the colors on non-Apple display... how do I fix it?

TheSpaz

TheSpaz

macrumors 604
Original poster
Jun 20, 2005
7,032
1
Okay, so I installed Snow Leopard on my parent's Mac mini and it has a Hanns.g display connected to it. In 10.5 Leopard, the colors looked normal (still not as good as an Apple monitor, but colors were close enough).

Anyway, like I said, I upgraded to Snow Leopard and now the monitor's color is all out of whack. I tried re-calibrating it and everything. The weird thing is, I got the Finder to look okay, but all of the blue icons in the Dock (iTunes, iChat, Safari, QuickTime etc) look PURPLE! Also, the menu bar selections are the same purple color instead of that light blue.

The other weird thing is... looking at the Finder icon in the Dock looks half purple and half light blue, but when I hit cmd-tab, it looks half blue and half light blue. The cmd-tab icon of the Finder looks like I'd expect it to look, but all the colors are completely destroyed in the Dock. Another thing is... scroll bars seem to look like normal blue too.

One more thing... when I tried doing the manual calibration, it shows you how bright to make the monitor with the little graphic. The graphic looked so washed out that I couldn't make the monitor dark enough (on the darkest setting) to get even close to the picture that the calibration tool wants me to see.

Is Snow Leopard only compatible with Apple monitors? I installed Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro (Apple Cinema Display) and all the colors are consistent.

Note: The colors look the same regardless of 2.2 gamma or 1.8 gamma, so please don't bring that up. I want BLUE icons... not purple!
 
You sure you are not booting into 64bit

I am sure you said yesterday this was the cause of peoples problems

Colours on my non Apple display work fine
 
paulsalter said:
You sure you are not booting into 64bit

I am sure you said yesterday this was the cause of peoples problems

Colours on my non Apple display work fine
Click to expand...

Not booting into 64 bit.

Wondering if I should try a clean install. Perhaps something got screwed up. Hmm.
 
Gamma is now 2.2

Reset your display to factory defaults and calibrate it from the Displays System Preference pane.
 
First set your display's colors as close to proper using the display's own controls (custom RGB settings etc) and only then use the calibration in OSX. Before you do that set the display to one of the basic profiles like sRGB or Color LCD.

Both my work monitor (Lenovo L220X) and home displays (Dell 3008WFP and Sony KDL40V4000 HDTV) look exactly like they did in 10.5.8 aside from the gamma difference.
 
"Snow Leopard ruined the colors on non-Apple display"
"One more thing... when I tried doing the manual calibration, it shows you how bright to make the monitor with the little graphic. The graphic looked so washed out that I couldn't make the monitor dark enough (on the darkest setting) to get even close to the picture that the calibration tool wants me to see."

OMG ! I rode many, many forums before seing someone that have the same problem I had when I updated to Snow Leo !

I have another issues, can U tell me if U have too :
- In display settings, no colors options : thousand / Millions that normaly appears in Leopard. :confused:
- When using a clearly wallpaper, it seems that pixels are moving when opening/closing a window (looks like a poor resolution) :(
- When doing a selection on the desktop, the transparent selection seems to disapear very slowly. :mad:

What the hell ? :confused:

NB : Xcuse my poor english, i'm french :p

MacPro 2X2.26 GHz Quad-Core (2009) - ATI 4870HD - Dell 2407WFP
 
yeah i got an acer connected to my macbook and the colors on the macbook were platinum while the acer were all blue after SL. i just opened the displays prefs and the one for the acer display comes up on its screen and i just clicked on one of the other settings...i think 'lcd color' and it went back to looking platinum
 
I tried resetting the monitor colors back to factory settings… then I tried to make the display neutral as best as I could.

Then I calibrated the monitor using System Preferences and NOTHING will fix the Dock icons. Every icon in the Dock looks purple-ish and it hurts my eyes to look at it.

Like I said before… the Finder and desktop picture looks just about how Leopard looked on this monitor, but the Dock is all screwed up and the menu bar selections are screwed up.

I don't understand why Snow Leopard would do this.

I may try a clean install to see if that clears it up. It's pretty ridiculous. Good thing this happened on my parent's computer instead of mine… I wouldn't be able to stand looking at that screen for more than 30 minutes.

It looked pretty close to normal in Leopard.
 
Help!

Ok, I've got the same prob. Mac mini connected to HP vs15 moniter. Dock is all purple and ugly. I've tried changing the moniter settings and calibrating and it still doesn't work. An interesting note is that a picture of a regular dock on the internet also looks purple but looks normal when running windows on my mac.
Please help.
 
kev123 said:
Ok, I've got the same prob. Mac mini connected to HP vs15 moniter. Dock is all purple and ugly. I've tried changing the moniter settings and calibrating and it still doesn't work. An interesting note is that a picture of a regular dock on the internet also looks purple but looks normal when running windows on my mac.
Please help.
Click to expand...

Weird!

This is such a weird thing going on. Did you do an upgrade or did you erase first?
 
I did an upgrade and I redid it twice to see if it was installed incorrectly. Hopefully apple will release an update or something that would correct this. I wonder if this only happened to mac minis?
 
kev123 said:
I did an upgrade and I redid it twice to see if it was installed incorrectly. Hopefully apple will release an update or something that would correct this. I wonder if this only happened to mac minis?
Click to expand...

It would annoy the crap out of me… seriously. My Mac Pro with Apple Cinema Display is fine.
 
Chusky said:
I have another issues, can U tell me if U have too :
- In display settings, no colors options : thousand / Millions that normaly appears in Leopard. :confused:
Click to expand...

That's entirely normal, they've simply removed the option because it was pretty much irrelevant - I mean who would run with less than the maximum number of colors?

Those of you having Dock issues, is there any change if you set the Dock to right or left position? Although since even pictures of the Dock appear tinted it seems like a color calibration issue. I recommend you try some of the profiles that come with OSX (Adobe RGB, sRGB and Generic RGB) to see if there's any change. On my Dell 3008WFP all of these look perfectly fine but the color profile for the MBP's internal display puts everything out of whack.

Also note that the factory settings on all but the best monitors are usually really off, with a blue, red or green tint depending on the preset. You should always use the custom RGB option (or whatever it's called) that lets you change red, green and blue colors individually. You can find some good test images for setting your monitor at http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Just remember that Firefox and I think Safari as well support color management so those images, especially the grayscale gradients, can appear tinted because your monitor calibration doesn't match sRGB. You can Google to find how to turn off color management in Firefox if needed.
 
Same Problem here with a Mac Mini and a LG Flatron L1919S.
I kind of managed to solve it by switching my color profile to "Allgemeines RGB-Profil" ("General RGB Profile" in English, i guess...). The colours still aren't the same as with Leopard, but blue is now blue ;)

Btw, I did a clean install...
 

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kasakka said:
That's entirely normal, they've simply removed the option because it was pretty much irrelevant - I mean who would run with less than the maximum number of colors?

Those of you having Dock issues, is there any change if you set the Dock to right or left position? Although since even pictures of the Dock appear tinted it seems like a color calibration issue. I recommend you try some of the profiles that come with OSX (Adobe RGB, sRGB and Generic RGB) to see if there's any change. On my Dell 3008WFP all of these look perfectly fine but the color profile for the MBP's internal display puts everything out of whack.

Also note that the factory settings on all but the best monitors are usually really off, with a blue, red or green tint depending on the preset. You should always use the custom RGB option (or whatever it's called) that lets you change red, green and blue colors individually. You can find some good test images for setting your monitor at http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Just remember that Firefox and I think Safari as well support color management so those images, especially the grayscale gradients, can appear tinted because your monitor calibration doesn't match sRGB. You can Google to find how to turn off color management in Firefox if needed.
Click to expand...

It's definitely not a color calibration issue. I know how to calibrate correctly. The blue in the Dock's Finder icon doesn't match the blue in the Application Switcher Finder icon and it's the SAME icon. Something's not right here and it's not the display.
 
I changed my color settings to sRGB and that helped my programs look normal, i.e. the close min, max look red, yellow and green instead of all green. The dock however still has the purple green tint to it. Stays the same even when moving the dock left or right and after restarting computer.
 
Does this dock color problem show up in a screenshot? It so it would be helpful for someone with this purple dock problem to post a picture of it.
 
kev123 said:
http://tinypic.com/r/34ep1l5/3
that's my dock with the purple and green on it.
Click to expand...

It looks to me as though there is something wrong with the color profile. It's also possible that Snow Leopard is doing something goofy like an incorrect remap of sRGB or RGB color space to the color space of the display.

I would expect that there will be a bug fix for this soon.
 
All right, I solved my problem. After changing the color profile to sRGB, I played around with the dock and found out that it was just those icons that were messed up. I deleted them from my dock and added them again from finder and now they look perfect.
Hope this helps everyone else.
Thanks for the help.
 
TheSpaz said:
Okay, so I installed Snow Leopard on my parent's Mac mini and it has a Hanns.g display connected to it. In 10.5 Leopard, the colors looked normal (still not as good as an Apple monitor, but colors were close enough).

Anyway, like I said, I upgraded to Snow Leopard and now the monitor's color is all out of whack. I tried re-calibrating it and everything. The weird thing is, I got the Finder to look okay, but all of the blue icons in the Dock (iTunes, iChat, Safari, QuickTime etc) look PURPLE! Also, the menu bar selections are the same purple color instead of that light blue.

The other weird thing is... looking at the Finder icon in the Dock looks half purple and half light blue, but when I hit cmd-tab, it looks half blue and half light blue. The cmd-tab icon of the Finder looks like I'd expect it to look, but all the colors are completely destroyed in the Dock. Another thing is... scroll bars seem to look like normal blue too.

One more thing... when I tried doing the manual calibration, it shows you how bright to make the monitor with the little graphic. The graphic looked so washed out that I couldn't make the monitor dark enough (on the darkest setting) to get even close to the picture that the calibration tool wants me to see.

Is Snow Leopard only compatible with Apple monitors? I installed Snow Leopard on my Mac Pro (Apple Cinema Display) and all the colors are consistent.

Note: The colors look the same regardless of 2.2 gamma or 1.8 gamma, so please don't bring that up. I want BLUE icons... not purple!
Click to expand...

Call Apple support!!!
 
I figured it out you guys.

In the Finder, do this:

1. CMD-Shift-G
2. Type in "/private/var/folders" without quotes
3. Click through folders until you find "com.Apple.dock.iconcache"
4. Delete that file
5. Logout or kill the Dock

All done! No more purple icons! Yay!
 
I would ask this,

push in the mini dvi or the micro dvi port in all of the way and see if the dvi\vga plug is in all of the way, i know the plugs with out the loks do that some times, I had my screen go blood red once
 
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