Colour bleeding and greenness

pickarooney

I'm having two problems with my display, which may or may not be related.
The first is that there is simply too much green. Whenever I play an AVI file, there's just a general greenness about it which is sometimes hard to stand. I've messed with all the monitor, graphics card and gamma settings that I can find, with no success.
The second problem relates to a sort of colour bleeding in certain areas. For instance, entries in my toolbar display fine, but in the system tray the icons will only appear with 16 colours. Same with the task manager list of processes. The only way to fix this that I've found in the past involves reformatting the drive and starting from scratch, as even reinstalling windows and the graphics drivers over the current installation doesn't fix this.
I'll enclose a screenshot, so youse might have some idea what
I'm talking about.

Compare the full coloured loveliness of the IE, kazaa and eMule logos in the quicklaunch bar and their washed-out equivalents in the system tray/task manager.

Typedef

Here's what you do.

Try a different monitor. If that fixes your problem, you know it's your monitor.

If that doesn't fix your problem, reinstall your graphics card drivers.

If you are using Windows < 2000 then you will have to specifically install the vga graphics drivers and make sure those ones are in use, before attempting to install your graphics drivers again.

Windows 9x has a tendancy to be a right bitch about graphics drivers and corrupts the things (for fun).

Adios.

Inspector Gadget

As far as I know, Windows 9x/ME/2k only support 16-colour system tray icons (unless you use a utility of some kind to hack Windows...); XP does, however, support full colour here.

Do a search on google and there's a ton of sites (curiously, none of them are MS... :rolleyes: ) that mention this problem.

Gadget

Typedef

Yeah I must say.... there didn't really seem to be anything noticablely wrong with that screenshot.

But maybe that's just me.

<hey: look over there>

Saruman

Agreed, there is nothing wrong with the screenshot... So if thats the case its possibly his monitor after all!!

Inspector Gadget

Erm, this is a known Windows (< XP) "issue"... hello? (or am I talking to myself?)

Anyway, a screenshot isn't exactly the best way to diagnose a monitor fault, is it...

Gadget

pickarooney

For what it's worth, it's not a monitor fault, I've checked with another monitor. However, I was blissfully unaware until recently that the system tray only supported 16 colours, probably because all the system tray icons up 'til now have been simple ones (designed with this in mind).
The other issue (greenness) is probably just my graphics card not being as fancy as that of my mates' with their anti-aliasing and whatnot. The problem arises whenever a night-scene from a film is displayed, the whites and other light colours all get this green hue which doesn't occur during daylight scenes.

Cheers.

Zab

Originally posted by pickarooney
The other issue (greenness) is probably just my graphics card not being as fancy as that of my mates' with their anti-aliasing and whatnot. The problem arises whenever a night-scene from a film is displayed, the whites and other light colours all get this green hue which doesn't occur during daylight scenes.

Are these DivXs? If so, try downloading a different player ( BSPlayer? ) and perhaps a codec pack ( Nemo? ). I get this when I use Media Player on an AMD/GF3 based machine I have. Also, make sure you have the latest drivers for your graphics card.

Zab.

Typedef

For what it's worth, it's not a monitor fault, I've checked with another monitor. ..... <snip> .....problem arises whenever a night-scene from a film is displayed, the whites and other light colours all get this green hue which doesn't occur during daylight scenes

Then it's a graphics driver or hardware fault with the agp itself.

First off specifically install VGA drivers for your graphics card.
Make sure those drivers are in use (ie... you only have 16 colours available and at best 800x600 resolution) and then install the most up-to-date version of the drivers for your graphics card.

Do that, exactly as I have just laid it out for you above.... if it doesn't work, you have a hardware problem.

mmmm
/tech support.

Inspector Gadget

...this "greenness" you talk of, is the whole movie window tinged green or is it just the dark areas of the image? If it's just the dark areas, you probably only need to meddle with the brightness and contrast - sounds like one or both are turned up too much.

Just an afterthought...
Gadget

pickarooney

I use BSPlayer nd have the nemo codecs installed, and have tried messing with the hue/brightness/contrast till the cows came home. (They were gone clubbing in Berlin, so it was quite a wait.)
I took a couple of screenshots, one from a low bitrate divx (100kb/sec) in semi-darkness, and one from a better quality file (700kb/sec) in daylight. I'm interested to see if the greenness is hard-coded into the jpeg, or, if not, if it shows up on other computers with better gfx cards.

This is the low quality shot:

Typedef

Try a different divx player.

If the problem only occurs when you are playing divx movies, then it is most likely not a graphics driver or hardware issue.

Here for example http://www.divxity.com/

grrr

pickarooney

and the higher quality one

pickarooney

Update : just checked the jpegs on a better computer and there's no hint of greenness on it. Curiouser and curiouser. Would physical damage to one of the pins on the gfx-card to monitor connection cause this?

Inspector Gadget

..you may be seeing "noise" from the video compression. Both the images you sent appeared to be too bright to begin with (and the "washout" effect was compounded by moderate to heavy lossy compression afterward) - this tends to introduce some odd colours into the mix (usually greens and reds; I'm reasonably sure I'm not colour blind, so I presume I'm seeing what I'm saying).

Also, the higher resolution image has large areas of white (which would be impossible if the image was tinted green), and looks quite washed out on my monitor (which the luminosity, red, green abd blue histograms seem to confirm); dropping the gamma to about 0.8 relative to the original (as you posted it) resulted in a much more natural image, at least to the combination of my eyes and my monitor

Gadget

Typedef

Originally posted by pickarooney
Update : just checked the jpegs on a better computer and there's no hint of greenness on it. Curiouser and curiouser. Would physical damage to one of the pins on the gfx-card to monitor connection cause this?

Hold it now mate.

Be clear. Do the jpegs look green on the first system?

If so, it is not simply a divx playback issue, understand?

Ie if the jpeg screenshots you took on the machine are themselves appearing green on the original machine, it can't be an issue limited to divx, therefore lets not chase after a possibility we have already disjuncted from our possible solution space.

So if you have confirmed (a) That with a different monitor present you still have the problem and (b) the issue is not limited to divx, but is present in 'whatever' application you view jpegs with then logically you can only be looking at graphics card drivers or a hardware problem.

That is simple logic. If you have already tried installing your agp as a VGA card and then once those drivers are in use (having made sure said drivers are in use after a reboot) you install the latest version of the drivers from the Nvidia website (by specifically downloading them), and the problem is still present, you must have broken hardware.

Again, simple logic.

marauder

Tell me you don't have a matrox graphics card (G400 maybe)?
I had really weird colour bleeding such as icons getting a pinkish hue in the task bar... reinstalling drivers etc did nothing to fix it..
Got a GF4 and never looked back.