Leopard’s Green Tint
Separate from the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death - it’s generally a Windows term, if you’re somehow unaware…) that some folks experienced after upgrading to Leopard, there’s word of a new bluish, or greenish tint that’s occurring on some user’s screens. Up until now I’ve been familiar with the bluish tint that results from Fast User Switching, but the symptoms I’ve heard of from Leopard are much different.
A friend’s MacBook Pro seemed to progressively get worse as the operating system’s uptime increases. Over that time, the tint to his screen got greener and greener - similar to the way an old CRT would look when it lost one of its color channels. A reboot fixed the issue, but it wasn’t a one time thing - nor does it seem to be predictable.
There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of similar occurrences found around the internet, thus, little else to point you toward at this time. If you’ve experienced this issue, we’d love to hear about your experience - what happened leading up to the tinting? How many times has it happened? Is there any rhyme or reason to when it occurs? Or maybe my friend’s MacBook Pro is just going south…Help us shed some light on this problem!
#1 David Novotny says:I have noticed that my Macbook Pro will sometimes have a strong tint to it when it wakes from sleep and I have plugged in the cinema display before I woke it up. I am not sure if the tint is green or orange, but I know it is definitely a lot warmer. The solution for me is to just open up the displays system preference pane, this causes it to reload the color settings and it jumps back to the settings I calibrated.
#2 Manda J says:I have Leopard installed on my G4 1.42 iBook and will leave it running for over 24 hours at a time and have never had any tinting start to happen for leaving it running long periods of time. Almost seems like a MacBook Pro issue - if so I’m sure Apple will release some kind of update for the problem as they usually do.
#3 Ben says:Perhaps this a corruption of the color calibration profile? I would suggest deleting the profile and also maybe deleting the Displays pref pane’s preference file (if that makes sense!).
#4 Rick says:So you mean only one user with multiple screens?
(Sorry, but after 3 helpful, substantive comments I thought it was time for a nitpicking one.)
#5 Adrian Simmons says:In Tiger the ‘bluish tint that results from fast user switching’ is a bug to do with permissions on display profiles.
What’s happening is that when you switch back accounts your monitor is reverting to its default calibration profile, you can only revert to normal with a reboot once it messes up. In my case it’s over bright, rather than bluish.
It is possible to fix this however, calibrating the monitor in each account should do it…have a read what I wrote in 2005 at my blog’s temporary home (redesign in process, sorry). Basically you need everyone to have permission to access a calibrated profile, you can do that by futzing with permissions or by each account having their own profile.
These leopard issues do sound different though. Still I’d have your friend calibrate their monitor etc.
#6 Brian K says:The same thing happens with my iMac G5 rev. C. I thought something was wrong so I was trying to create a new display profile to fix the issue. After restarting the computer and logging in, after about 5 to 10 seconds, the tint appears. I just log into Front Row and then exit it, and the display looks perfectly normal until I restart again.
#7 Anonymous says:It’s getting to the point where I can’t tell whether the people at TAB like macs or don’t. Green tint of death? Come on.
#8 Nick Santilli says:Thanks for the suggestions - I had actually suggested that he check the color profiles next time it happened. But he’s on vacation and haven’t heard from him in a few days. Guess we’ll see.
Rick - my friend found a couple similar instances after some googling, but he hadn’t passed the links on to me. Giving him the benefit of the doubt I made mention of the couple other findings of his. Perhaps shame on me…
Anonymous - [rereading] nope, don’t see ‘green screen of death’ in there anyplace.
Yes, I do like macs.
#9 PG says:I also have the issue that on wake-up form sleep, when the MacBook Pro just invoked the screen saver, the screen has a light bluish tint. Opening Display preferences fixes it by reloading the color calibration settings.
#10 Brett Hinkle says:I installed Leopard then night it came out, and have never had a green tint.
I have a Black MacBook, so it does seem to be either a random issue, but not a common one, or a MacBook Pro issue, since G4s, and MacBooks aren’t having those issues.
#11 sumopro says:I installed Leopard and havent had too many problems. (maybe starting up a little slower) until I left my comp on for about 15 hours sleeping. when i came back and tried to wake it up.It wouldnt respond when i typed or clicked the mouse. Then it started running VERY hard/fast. It sounded like the fan was going crazy. i did a hard reset and it seemed like it was ok. It fell asleep later that day and the same thing happened when i tried to wake it up again.
Does anyone have am explanation to this?
#12 CC says:My iPhone had this problem. I opened Safari went to a website quite next thing I know my iPhone went all green tint on me and I mean the icons had a greenish glow instead of the blue background in most of the apps it was definitely green after that the battery could not hold a charge and it seemed to randomly turn on when it wanted to and was getting all hot I mean really hot i thought the thing was going to explode or something… Now this post is got me wondering if syncing to Leopard caused the iPhone to go green… This all happened after the Leopard upgrade.
#13 Erick M says:I’ve got a MacBook Pro with the 17″ high-resolution screen. SInce upgrading to Leopard (and adding a 30″ Cinema Display) I keep getting what I see as a bluish or purplish tint when the machine wakes up from sleep. I invoke Display Preferences and -poof- it’s gone.
I was annoyed with this, and the fact that it was still there after the 10.5.1 update, that I used it as an excuse to buy a Huey Pro to match the two displays and perhaps force the display profiles to stay in place.
I was able to match the displays a -little- bit better, but they still look different, and my MBP screen still goes blue. But the cinema display always wakes up looking perfect.
#14 Gustavo says:Hello, well it happened to me today, and I was just searching around the problem and found this site. What happened to me was that I was watching tv and then I came back after the computer made and update to quicktime 7.3, when I came and moved the mouse I realize immediately that the display had a bluish color, I opened safari first and nothing happened, then I opened SysPref and suddenly the normal color came back, I restarted the MPB and all was fine, hopefully this is software related and not hardware. Please if someone can send this to apple and tell them what its going on I will really appreciate it.
#15 Lacy D says:This happens to me regularly, almost daily. If I leave my MacBook Pro (running Leopard) for any length of time, such that the screen saver runs, when I return to work again, the screen has a bluish cast and all the colors are washed out. It doesn’t matter which application I’m running at the time, and I’m the sole user of the computer. Suggestions would be most welcome.
#16 Erick M says:I reported above that I’ve got the same thing. Does it disappear when you open display preferences (without actually clicking on anything in the Prefs)?
I sent my MBP in for another display-related problem (no image at all) and they did a full logic board replacement. But the blue problem persists.
I’ve got a 17″ MBP with the high-resolution screen option. Do you have the same?
#17 billy says:I have the same problem exactly as described here
#18 Rick says:Nick, you give me too much credit by thinking I was attacking the substance of the article! I was pointing out your apparent confusion over the singular and plural possessive forms. I think you meant
some users’ screens (apostrophe after the plural s)
rather than
some user’s screens
which means “the screens of one indeterminate user”
There really are occasions where failing to make the distinction really will lead to misunderstandings.
#19 James says:I have the exact same issue, i dont think it happens gradully, it seems to be when the screen has blacked out, gone into screen saver, or gone to sleep. and when it wakes-up the screen has a light blue tint. Again, it is fixed by simply opening display preferences.
i’m on a 15″ MBP Pro widescreen, with one of the newer LED panels running 10.5.2. This has only happened since installing leopard which i did froma complete re-format.
#20 Carrie says:I’ve had this problem twice recently. Seems to happen when I wake my computer up from being asleep but certainly not every time and I can’t determine what’s triggering it.