How to Fix Screen Colour Changes in Mountain Lion #OSX

I recently upgraded to Mountain Lion when it was released. The download took a while – as you’d imagine with a 4Gb payload – and the installer did hang at the end, though a reboot fixed this.

However, the biggest problem I had was that the screen brightness and colour changed when I ran different applications. It was consistent for each application – Google Chrome made the screen brighter or washed out, Adobe InDesign threw a blue hue over the screen (as did a couple of other apps). As a web designer, it makes it difficult to design when the screen changes colour!

Digging around on the web showed I was not alone (which meant it wasn’t a localised hardware problem) and there appeared to be an easy fix: Sort out the permissions on some of the system files.

This is an automated procedure which takes a while and can be implemented as follows:

1. Open the DISK UTILITY program in the UTILITIES folder under APPLICATIONS.
2. Click the REPAIR PERMISSIONS button and let it do its thing (I usually click VERIFY PERMISSIONS first out of curiosity to see what’s wrong before I let the machine start changing things, but that’s just me being cautious – probably a hang over from my Windows days when automated programs often did more than you expected!)

This worked for me (and many others out there on the Internet). It also helped speed up my upgraded Mac – a few applications invoked the spinning colour wheel of death before I fixed the permissions, but the machine now runs much more smoothly after the permissions were fixed.

Good luck with this resolution and let me know if you needed to do anything else on your machine in the comments below to help other readers out. Thanks.

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