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Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery Yellow haze

Vista appears to have some issue with displaying jpeg images using the built-in Windows Photo Gallery. If you open up a jpeg photo it will appear like sepia or have a yellow tint to the photo. The image appears fine in slideshow mode, other applications, or even in the thumbnail view for the folders. The problem seems tied into the ICC profile for color management. I don’t know if this is only associated with Vista and flat panel monitors or quite what the trend is, but here’s what solved the problem for me.

Visit Adobe’s download site and choose to download the ICC profile download for End Users.
Right-click on your desktop and go to Personalize…
Click Display Settings
Click Advanced Settings…
Go to the “Color Management” tab.
Click the “Color Management” button.
Check “Use my settings for this device”
Go down to the list below and select the profiles and delete them with the “Remove” button.
Click “Add” and then Browse to where you downloaded the Adobe color profiles and select Adobe RGB {1998} and hit Add/Ok.
Hit Ok on the Color Management window and reboot.

Preview your images and see that the problem should be corrected.

Simply removing the loaded color profiles only resulted in dark images, but the yellow went away. Loading the Adobe ICC fixed the problem entirely.

Update: It seems Windows Server 2008 is also likely to have this problem. Fortunately, the same solution works to correct it.