Windows 10: Windows Photo Viewer - one-by-one VS slideshow...the colors change!

I used instructions from this forum to get Windows Photo Viewer back on my Windows 10 machine, thank you. When I 'page through' a folder with photos the colors are back to matching (as close as I can tell anyway) the colors I saw in photoshop when I made the file. I put Photo Viewer in because this was not the case in the Photos program that comes as the default with Windows 10.

But wait! The slideshow colors inside Photo Viewer are so obviously completely different from the one-by-ones, I'm hoping you can help me get the slideshow working too. I apologize if this is an old story and I just missed the fix. Thank you!

:)

 

Windows10 Photoviewer Problems

The new photo viewer in Windows 10 does not work properly. If I choose "slideshow" in viewer, the photos are viewed full screen and display one at a time. The viewer steps through the photos one at a time, beginning with the one it was on when "slide show
was selected. It progresses through the photos until it suddenly flips back to where it first started. It refuses to go through all of the photos in the current directory. I thought Windows 10 worked. Not so. Is there a better app for working with photos
that works?

 

Slideshow settings in Photo app on window 10 adjusting duration

This app is also flawed compared to the Windows 7 Photo Viewer in that when playing the slideshow the photos are not maximized to the edge of the screen. Also you cannot set the slideshow to loop or be random. I guess MS would know this however, as they
are pretty damn obvious omissions. So it's back to Windows Photo Viewer for me (the registry edits are out there if you need them).

Hope you sort it out one day.

 

Is it because the slideshow is full screen, but the one-by one view is scaled-down fractionally?

The scaled-down versions will show pixels that are colored to average values of more than one pixel, and may appear a little washed-out, smeary, and the edges of objects and text will appear slightly poorly defined or blurry.

If it's the other way around as your post appears to imply, then are you running at native resolution for your Monitor? - or at some increased scale like 125% - which may make fullscreen images appear slightly "wrong".

EDIT - Then I got distracted and forgot to mention the built-in color calibration functions in the Windows 10 Advanced Display Settings reached by right clicking on the desktop, and following the menu choices, which may lead to a more uniform experience if all your display hardware settings work in harmony.

 

Thank you!

Yes, it's the slideshow that is wrong, faded badly as the Photos program that came with Windows 10 did, and the one-by-one view in Photo Viewer fixed.

The one-by-one is scaled down ever so slightly from the slideshow because I run the one-by-one at full screen too so the difference is a small heading and footer. My display is one of those mega-pixel guys which I cannot begin to read at 100% so I run it normally at 175%. I just put it to 100% to test that idea and the slideshow was still very faded.

I did go through the display settings and everything looked ok. My photoshop is ok I think and hence the one-by-one that looks like the photoshop version, because the pictures generally look fine on other people's displays - computers, tablets, phones, etc.

If you have any other ideas I'm happy to try them!

 

Even though you have tried all reasonable avenues, I feel that Microsoft will not be very helpful regarding full rehabilitation or offer better support for the Windows Photo Viewer - which they seem to feel is legacy software (although it has functionality beyond their chosen successor - the Photos App, which many feel is not a worthy successor) - although we users can continue to complain via the Feedback Hub in our droves - I try to complain with each Insider update that the old functionality is not present in the latest builds - perhaps there will be some bending of resolve.

One problem is that the Windows Photo Viewer is not a standalone application - it is an executable .dll file called via rundll32.exe by primary applications - originally the Windows Fax driver to view fax images, and later by Explorer.exe, as a general image file previewer and springboard to image manipulation programs - which emphasises it's evolution and legacy provenance.

In these cases third party image viewers seem to be the only alternative - if you can find a suitable one.

Wikipedia offer a comparison page: Comparison of image viewers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

At last on my new laptop I was able to put Windows Photo Viewer Back by following the instructions,
I do not have any of what you are getting

 

Thank you all!

Since your pictures were looking ok in both modes hT, I saved a random picture off the internet, opened it with Photo Viewer, and it did look much more, if not entirely the same in one-by-one and slideshow mode. Now I'm worried that I'm saving my pictures wrong...or something...I wonder how could that happen?

Any ideas most welcome!

 

For years I thought Microsoft might take the route of "One App To Show Them All" to paraphrase LOTR, because it came close with Internet Explorer being able to shift to (File) Explorer, MSOffice apps almost seamlessly and with the ability to show graphic images too.

EDGE defaulted to PDF reader too, but was poorly featured, and when a file location was typed in, it reverted to File Explorer, so no progress there.

Google Chrome can take a path to a folder and open various image files (among other data types), but cannot offer a slideshow mode, so there's little competition there for MS Developers to seamlessly view various filetypes, or the same filetype in a page-by-page or slideshow format. Shame.

 

Thanks for the Chrome idea! Feel free to skip down to IN SUMMARY below...

I tried Chrome and the NEF (Nikon's raw) wouldn't display but the JPEGs saved from photoshop (both 'save as' and 'save for web') looked fine.

From Windows Photo Viewer displaying one-by-one, NEF and JPEGs all look fine.

I downloaded FastStone (a 3rd party slideshow option) and the NEFs looked fine. The JPEGs where I used 'save as', the color looks faded, but where I used 'save for web' the color looks fine. It's the same for them in one-by-one or slideshow.

From Windows Photo Viewer Slideshow, it acts the same as FastStone where the 'save as' JPEGs are faded but 'save for web' color-wise is ok. One thing, I 'save as' first then make the picture much smaller for 'save for web' so 'save for web' is already a JPEG before it gets saved...and that double process might have something to do with it?

In summary! JPEGs created in photoshop with 'save as' from NEF files display properly in Chrome and Windows Photo Viewer one-by-one and display faded in Windows Photo Viewer Slideshow and FastStone.

If you have any recommendations of what else I can test, what slideshow software might work, a photoshop expert in case I'm saving these files wrong...any help at all would be great!

 

Not sure it can help or if it's relevant but might be worth a try

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/wi...iewing-images/

 

Thank you shimshom, I had a look at the link but since a color cast is not my problem I didn't go through the process of deleting profiles unsure of unintended consequences BUT in the process of clicking around from that site I found this, from what a guy wrote in 2012, but it does sound like it might have something to do with me, which looks like there is an embedded profile in my JPEGs which would make one-by-one work and slideshow fail:

"(1.) Windows Photo Viewer by default honors embedded profiles in images and displays them accordingly to that profile and if an image is untagged (no profile embedded) it will default to sRGB IEC 61966-2.1 - always ignoring the specified system default profile.
(2.) Windows Photo Viewer in Slideshow Mode does the exact opposite. It ignores embedded profiles and displays all images via the specified system default profile."

I went to FastStone's settings, CMS, Enable Color Management System (it was disabled by default) and the JPEGs in their slideshow are definitely now better than Windows Photo Viewer Slideshow. I couldn't find a similar setting in Windows Photo Viewer.

(the big hint: Windows Photo Viewer And ICC Profiles)

 

Interesting finds on the way Images are processed to look different in WPV - thanks for that info.

Google's Picasa is still around in V.3.9 - Picasa - It does a similar range of things like slideshows and image by image as in WPV, but it is a total image organizer if you want - and will back up images to Google Drive cloud storage, I think, and has a range of image modification effects, transforms, and other manipulations. Free to use.

Crazy - after having downloaded from the link above, and installed and opened Picasa I get taken here:

What's happening to Picasa Picasa Web Albums? - Picasa and Picasa Web Albums Help

Of which the gist is Picasa is retired - it will work but is unsupported, so possibly a no-go -sorry - while in the background it is busy cataloging all my pictures hmpf!

 

Too bad about Picasa - people like it. Now that I understand about the embedded profile not being read by some programs (MPV Slideshow it seems!), I feel much better! At least the 10s of 1000s of JPEGs I've saved with photoshop are not ruined...and the free and easy FastStone is running slideshows a-ok with decent color.

So thanks to all who participated, for walking with me down this particular path. See you next time I get stuck!