MacBook Pro – Fixing the Blue Tint problem
Posted by: Richard in Apple, Gadgets, TechnologyWhilst I’m very happy with my new Mac Book Pro, there are a couple of longer term gripes.
Firstly, the heat. Everybody has heard about it, but it beggars belief at times that it can get quite so hot when doing CPU intensive operations. I generally try and keep it off our new wood floor when, for example, it’s sat in the corner doing some DVD backups.
There is another problem that’s come to light, so to speak, recently. This is what I’ve loosely called “the blue tint problem”, specifically that the display takes on a light blue (some might say cyan) tint. It’s really weird, and it had me horribly worried that it was because of a loose connection in the display. I generally noticed it after opening the computer up after it was folded down, and I was beginning to think I might have to get apple care involved.
But it transpires it has a less serious cause, and a much easier solution. It’s apparently brought about by fast user switching getting a bit confused. This fits with my laptops usage, as my better half makes use of an account on the computer, as does her brother who pops by occasionally. I’d rather they had their own accounts to do as they will, than tramping all over my stuff, including client-sensitive documents, details and so forth.
Mac OSX Hints has more detail, but the solution, if you get the tint problem, is simply to run the following in Terminal:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/ Versions/A/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DMProxy
Sorry – this wraps around rather badly. It’s really one very long command, so make sure there are no spaces. Personally, I’ve added an alias to my ~/.bash_profile such that I only type ‘fixtint’ at the command line (Bash is the default shell in Terminal, so add:
alias fixtint=/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/ CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DMProxy
to define the alias (ditto that it should be one long line, with only a space between ‘alias’ and ‘fixtint’. It fixes the problem immediately. Here’s hoping that Apple work out how to properly solve this issue in a forthcoming update.
<!–adsense–>
Entries (RSS)
July 30th, 2007 at 4:32 am
Richard, a quick thank you for documenting this MBP tint problem on your site. It’s really helped me out.
regards, Maki
November 3rd, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Thanks for posting this tip. I’m encountering the same problem on my MBP and it’s over a year later than when you posted this! The solution (thankfully) still applies, though.
November 7th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Thank you so much for this – it is also affecting the normal (!) Macbook – a 2.16Ghz Intel in my case
All the best! R
June 25th, 2008 at 8:46 am
It is not only caused by user switching, mine does it all the time and there is only one user.
A simpler fix is to just open System Preferences and click on Display one time.
July 7th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Thanks for great post. The system preferences and click on display by Darryl Cannon worked for me
July 21st, 2008 at 5:35 pm
That works. But an easier fix is to turn on ‘Hot Spots’ to initiate the screensaver. When the Blue Tint pops up, hot corner the screensaver and immediately exit it and the problem is gone. No terminal necessary.
August 29th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Amazing it’s still present on current MBPs&Leopard, cmd+option+eject also works
October 9th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Hey , an easier way to fix the tint problem :
ctrl, shift, eject
will reset the display
November 4th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
WOW!!!!! That worked (ctrl, shift, eject)
I have a 17″ MacBook Pro with a 23″ Sony SDM-p234 external and thought i was going crazy when i kept noticing my laptop screen tint.
December 5th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
This issue wasn’t present until I upgraded from my 13″ black MacBook to the new, late 2008, 15″ MacBook Pro with the unibody aluminum design. It happened twice since upgrading to Safari 3.2.1 along with an error with the quartz rendering engine. Good to know there’s an easy fix and hope Apple fixes this soon!
December 19th, 2008 at 7:49 am
[...] did a little Googling this evening and found a post on leyton.org with a fix that worked perfectly for me. I don’t use Fast User Switching on this machine so I [...]
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Amazing, that fixed my problems. I was sure that it was the dodgy nvidia card in the MBP but not so. Thanks a lot!
May 25th, 2009 at 2:32 am
To me, the only thing that worked was hitting fn+F7.
June 16th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Thanks a lot man! I was afraid I had bumped into a hardware issue once the blue tint appeared. I went to System pref. and clicked the Display settings icon and the problem was magically fixed
July 6th, 2009 at 12:51 am
Thanks for this guidance! That blue tint was worrisome on my new MacBook Pro. I’m surprised that Apple still hasn’t resolved this bug.
August 9th, 2009 at 6:30 am
Thanks for the posts. Control + Shift + Eject reset the display and fixed it.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:30 am
Also of note, my screen just went blue not 24 hours after I installed Snow Leopard. So if you did a fresh clean install of 10.6, you can add the fixtint alias to your list of things to set up.
September 2nd, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Darryl Cannon suggestion worked perfectly. Thanks to everyone for the posts. Hopefully this will be resolved in Snow Leopard.
“A simpler fix is to just open System Preferences and click on Display one time.”
September 12th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Thanks so much for this solution!
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:06 am
The DMProxy solution worked like a charm – messing around in System Preferences’ Display pane did nothing for me. Didn’t try the ctrl-shft-eject solution, but I’ll keep it in mind for next time that happens.
Blue tint appeared after having disconnected the laptop from an external Cinema Display (20″, 2005). No fast user switching.
Also, after running DMProxy, a new color profile appeared in the Color tab of the Displays pane, called “Color LCD” that wasn’t there immediately before.
MBP 15″ (2009)
10.6.1 (Snow Leopard)
September 25th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Just happened to me for the first time, 3 days after I installed Snow Leopard.
System Preferences / Display then “Color” tab fixed it.
Thanks to all for suggestions
October 1st, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Thanks! This has been annoying me for some time. No fast user switching, just when unlocking the screen saver.
October 17th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Just had a similar issue on my 2 year-old Core2-Duo MacBookPro 17″ running 10.6.1. None of the fixes I’ve seen for this issue helped. I tried resetting the PRAM and the SMC to no avail. The issue persisted after a number of reboots, with even the initial boot screen showing a blue apple logo on a blue-ish background, instead of dark-grey on grey
Eventually, I resorted to trying the Hardware Test tool on the disk that came with the machine. This didn’t look as if it would help, as the language selector dialog manifested the same issue, but it did subsequently switch the screen to look normal again before presenting the hardware test dialog. The test ran without issue, and now 10.6.1 boots again with a normal screen.
Hope this helps anyone having a similar issue.
October 21st, 2009 at 9:19 am
Thank you! I too was scared this was a LCD internal connection issue. And that also after spending a decent amount of time wondering if my glasses were dirty
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:05 pm
the fastest fix i discovered is to make the screen flash once, for example by pressing the tab key in terminal (you need to enable ‘flash the screen when an alert sound occurs’ in the universal access preference pane) =)
/f
October 23rd, 2009 at 4:39 am
Isn’t this issue just a case of the display preferences getting confused and changing the color profile? I’ve had a blue tint on my MPB (2.26Ghz, Core2Duo, running 10.6.1) since I bought it a few months ago (Aug 09). I’ve used it with a 24 inch cinema display from day one so that may have something to do with the selection of the bluish profile.
After talking to Apple support, I opened system prefs and changed the colour profile from sRGB IEC61966-2.1 to Color LCD, which has no blue tint to it. You can also use the calibrate option under the color tab and save a new custom profile if you want a specific color balance.
November 21st, 2009 at 5:35 pm
I am soooo glad that I googled “macbook pro blueish tint after wake up”. So there are many ways to address this. I prefer (ctrl, shift, eject) .
December 17th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
The problem in my Macbook Pro got worse and worse until the screen would no longer turn on. I took it to the repair shop and I was told my blueish screens were related to a defect of the video board. They said Apple had actually made a recall for the problem. Therefore, my board was replaced by a new one for free (the guarantee had already expired). The computer is perfect now.
January 15th, 2010 at 11:51 pm
Thanks a lot for the tip. Worked like a charm. I’ve had my laptop for about 6 months and have been doing some heavy CPU load in the past few days so I noticed the heat and the loud fan trying to cool it down just recently. When I opened it up today I thought the thing was broken, heat and then the screen blue, but a quick Google search found this page and I’m back to normal. Thanks again for the tip. Keep up the great work.
January 18th, 2010 at 3:11 am
Thanks for the information. That fixed the same problem on my MPB. It was driving me nuts to the point I was ready to sell my MBP. This was a lifesaver!
January 21st, 2010 at 5:09 pm
Worked like a charm – thx!
January 24th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Well, clicking System Profile, then Display worked for me. I suppose it’s not a permanent fix, but it’s better then restarting the computer each time this happens.
It does not seem to be caused by any one thing as I will go to bed with everything fine, and when I wake up the screen will have blue tint. No user switching or heavy CPU use – but shortly after I purchased my computer I borrowed a friends EyeOneMatch3 Display Color Profiler to make a color profile, so I thought this was to blame. It happened to several other people who downloaded the program too. They did not notice the bluish screen thing until shortly after the download. But none of the previous posts mention this so I guess there are many things which cause this problem.
Surly Apple knows about this by now?
February 4th, 2010 at 8:14 pm
This doesn’t seem to work for me. I’ve tried it several times with no luck. Ruinning 15″ MBP with Intel.
February 4th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Oh, sorry seems like I had one space somewhere left, sorry again, worked like a charm.
February 18th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
I ran into this problem in March of 2009. It lead to more than just the blue tint. Eventually the display went totally wacky. I finally did some research and found that Apple conducted it’s own internal audit of NVIDEA and found some of the video chips sold to Apple were bad (my MBP included). Apple ended up replacing my logic board at no cost.
Two weeks ago (02-04-10) the blue tint was back. I immediately brought my MBP into my local Apple store and after a video test found the chip was bad again. Apple replaced the logic board a second time (at no cost to me).
Well, two weeks later, the blue tint is back. I have an appointment in under an hour to run a video test. I’ll post the results….
February 18th, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Well, the video chip and logic board are okay. The Apple Store has me running a “Capture Disk” utility that I’ll email to them if I have any more “blue tint” issues. This will then send a log to the engineers at Apple to diagnose.
May 19th, 2010 at 6:56 am
Same blue tint problem on my 10-month-old MacBook Pro (OSX 10.5.8), appearing at random intervals after de-freezing the laptop (no user switch involved). I was worried, though it did look like a software issue. The command line solution worked perfectly, next time I’ll try ctrl-shift-eject. Thank you.
June 21st, 2010 at 12:07 am
System Preferences + Display = Perfection
Thanks!!!!