How to Fix Defective Monitor Profile in Windows 10 – Photoshop

ERROR: MONITOR PROFILE APPEARS TO BE DEFECTIVE.

Using Photoshop Creative Cloud with certain monitors can throw an error warning.  The result of this error will cause your screen to display color that is washed out or with a yellowish tint.

It can happen with a variety of monitors but seems common with Samsung monitor profile.  A monitor profile is a set of attributes that simply instruct how colors should appear on the screen as intended by the manufacturer.

If the monitor profile is defective, the colors will not display properly.  This issue can also arise when using a second monitor with a laptop as shown in this example.

In this case, the error was thrown with the following specifications:

• • • Application: Adobe Photoshop CC
  • • OS: Windows 10
  • • Monitor Profile: Samsung – Natural Color Pro 1.0 ICM

As with any software, Photoshop users can experience compatibility issues but thankfully here’s a quick fix.

SOLVED: MONITOR PROFILE APPEARS TO BE DEFECTIVE

The solution below will provide the fastest and easiest method to address this problem without having to delete or edit any existing monitor profiles.

Fix-time: 1 minute

1. 1. Close Photoshop CC if opened.
   2. From the taskbar, search for “Color Management” or manually open it from Control Panel.
   3. Once in “Color Management” you should be able to identify “Display: 1” and the active Monitor Profile causing the problem.  If you don’t see the active monitor profile causing the error, check “Display: 2” if using one.
   4. Once the display that is causing the error is determined, add another profile by clicking “Add”.
   5. From the list of profiles, choose “sRGB virtual device model profile” and click “OK”.
   6. Choose the new “sRGB virtual device model profile” and click “Set as Default Profile”.
   7. Close Color Management and Re-launch Photoshop.

The completed steps should have now corrected the monitor profile error.  Choosing “ignore” from the error message would essentially achieve the same outcome but the error message would reappear every time Photoshop is re-started.  Setting sRGB as default simply makes the message go away.