How to open color management in Windows 10

[JamieKavanagh]

Color management is more important to the user experience than most people realize. It influences games, text, web browsing and general use. It also has a huge effect on images, videos and any creative work done on the machine too. If you would like to learn how to open color management in Windows 10 and manage it more effectively, this tutorial is for you.

Different monitor manufacturers have different ideas about how color is represented on their screens. Different technologies can also render color differently, depending on a huge list of variables. To make sense of all that, each manufacturers provides color profiles which tell the monitor exactly how to display color on the screen.

Using these color profiles causes the monitor to display the images exactly as the creator intended, rather than how the monitor interprets it. A small but very important distinction.

Color management in Windows 10
To open color management in Windows 10:

Type or paste ‘colorcpl’ into the Search Windows box.

Or:
Type or paste ‘colorcpl.exe’ into a CMD window with administrator privileges.

Or:
Type or paste ‘colorcpl’ into a Windows PowerShell box.

Color management desktop shortcut
If you need to, you can create a desktop shortcut to quickly access color options within Windows 10.

1. Right click the desktop and select New, then Shortcut.
2. Type or paste ‘%windir%\system32\colorcpl.exe’ into the location box.
3. Enter a descriptive name for the shortcut and click Finish.

From here you can install color profiles from your monitor manufacturer or use a wide range of defaults from around the world. If you would like to learn more about color management in Windows 10, this page on the Microsoft website is extremely useful.

If you would like to learn more about color profiles, try this tutorial:
How to install a color profile for your monitor in Windows 10

View all of our Windows 10 Tutorials