Color management under Windows 10

[DanK]

I recently got a laptop that has a good enough screen that I decided I could use it for lightweight photo editing while on the go. I replaced my calibration device with the i1 display pro, which has drivers that work with Windows 10. I calibrated the monitor. I'm not convinced that I did it entirely correctly because the Pro has far more options than my old device, but at first look, it seemed reasonable.

However, I ran into a Windows 10 problem. The new profile was of course far darker than the default setting, as it should be. With the new profile, the Windows brightness slider is set to its maximum at that lower brightness level, so it seems not to be possible to increase the brightness while using that profile. That means that for the other uses that account for 95% of the machine's use--editing text files and the like--I had to change back to the default profile.

And that was the problem. I couldn't find a way to switch back and forth. Windows 10 places user profiles on a separate tab in the relevant dialog from the control panel, and above the user's own profiles is a check box telling windows to use yours. When I uncheck that check box, the machine reverts to its defaults, but my profile disappeared from that page.

I also found a way to tell it to revert to the default that did leave my profile on that page, but nothing I did would cause Windows to use it again.

Does anyone know a simple way to switch back and forth between a user-generated profile and the Windows defaults?

Short of that, I think I will end up using one of the Windows icm files, which is labeled sRGB, and just lower brightness.

many thanks

[Manfred M]

It was far easier to do this with the old "Control Panel". Microsoft has buried this functionality well in its efforts to "simplify" things for us.

1. Right click on the background screen to access the popup and selected the item that is second from the bottom labeled "Display settings".

2. Once that is open, scroll to the very bottom and click on "Display Adapter Properties", which will open another popup. Select the "Color Management" tab.

3. That will get you to another button that says "Color Management", click on that. This will finally get you to another popup; here select the "All Profiles" tab and that should get you access to any of the profiles, including all the defaults for your machine. Select the one you want and you should be in business.

[DanK]

Manfred,

thanks. I'll give this a try.

BTW, you can get around the "simplification." If you click on the start button and start typing, without placing the cursor anywhere, Windows will start looking for matches. You can call up any program this way. On my computer, typing "con" is enough to bring up the old control panel.

You can also get some of the additional controls by hitting the Windows key and X, which will bring up a "power menu" in the lower left corner of the screen.

Dan