Help! Hardware calibration and Win 8

I've tried both the on-board graphics with my i7-4770 set-up and a Radeon HD7770 card, but I cannot get color management to work at all for my Windows 8 computer.

I have a NEC PA241W monitor that I hardware calibrate with NEC's SectraView II. It works perfectly on my Win 7 (i7-930) machine ... after connecting the puck and installing the software you run the calibration and get perfect results every time. I don't touch ANYTHING in Windows Color Management. Couldn't be simpler.

However, here are the bizarre things I'm seeing with Win 8:

1. I calibrate to full gamut and have an aRGB image as my Windows desktop. After calibration the image looks too bright and over-saturated. I check how it's tagged in Bridge, and sure enough it's aRGB. Weird.

2. I open up bridge and click on the folder with an sRGB and aRGB version of the same image. The preview looks identical for both versions ... and the preview has the proper saturation and brightness.

3. I minimize bridge and then maximize it and the preview of the selected image is overly saturated and bright, matching the desktop.

4. I click on the other version of the image in Bridge and the thumbnails and previews instantly correct to the proper brightness and saturation.


It seems like somehow Win 8 has a standard monitor profile that is conflicting with the profile created by hardware calibration. Since I can calibrate to a different luminance and actually see the Windows desktop image adjust (although both instances the image is rendered wrong) it's almost like there is some sort of double profiling going on.

I thought at first that it was the new Intel on-board graphics, so I took the Radeon HD7770 card out of my other PC where calibration works perfectly, installed it with the latest drivers for Win 8 ... and got exactly the same result.

The good thing is that minimizing or maximizing in LR or PS CS6 doesn't change the image preview.

Anyone have any ideas?

FIXED!!! (well at least for the most part)

The baffling desktop image behavior is due to a difference between Win 7 and Win 8. In Win 7 you select a desktop image file and it uses it. In Win 8 it takes the file, highly compresses it AND STRIPS THE COLOR PROFILE FROM IT! Therefore, not only is the resulting desktop image poor quality (artifacts) it also won't color manage properly when using a wide gamut monitor calibrated for full gamut.

Fortunately I found out how to fix it on the Overclockers forum. Please note that this only works if you use a single image for your desktop background. If you use a slideshow you're hooped:

1. Got to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\​Roaming\Microsoft\Wind​ows\Themes\CachedFiles and paste a copy of the uncompressed "tagged" image you want to use in the CachedFiles folder (I'll call this your good image file).

2. Write down or copy the name of the original file in the CachedFiles folder that needs to be replaced (the highly compressed version), then delete that particular file.

3. Rename your good file to what you copied in #2 above.

4. In the folder level above CachedFiles (the Themes folder) paste another copy of your good (tagged) image file.

5. Delete the file called "TranscodedWallpaper"

6. Rename the good file you placed in "Themes" to "TranscodedWallpaper" and this time ensure it doesn't have an extension (i.e., delete the .jpg extension). It should show in the folder as Type "File".

Re-boot your machine and a higher quality, properly color managed image shows up!


The only odd behavior that I have left is the Bridge previews behaving like untagged aRGB images when minimizing then maximizing Bridge. As soon as you click on one of the image thumbnails it instantly corrects. This might be an Adobe glitch and not Win 8, so I'm not going to worry about it since I rarely use Bridge anymore anyway, and it's really only a display issue after maximizing. LR and PS CS6 don't have the issue.

The desktop issue really made me not trust my calibration, but after carefully testing it everything looks to be perfect now.