You may have a different (read: wrong) opinion, but I can’t stand looking at an image surrounding by blinding white monitor; it really detracts from the photograph or drawing (or what have you) I’m supposed to be admiring.  Is this why some folks wear sunglasses indoors?  Maybe.

Not all applications do this (the Mac application Preview uses gray for its background color), but Windows Photo Viewer does.  Usually it’s a blinding white light all around the picture.  Well, if you have a Samsung monitor it might be a dingy yellow light.  Microsoft surely blames that on Samsung, in spite of the fact that it is Microsoft’s software which is choosing the background color.  I digress.

There is great fortune in certain corners of the world of computing and here we have one.  It is possible to select the background color in Windows Photo Viewer.

If you have a Samsung monitor you may want to see this thread if my instructions don’t work for you.  There is a Control Panel item called Color Management and on its All Profiles tab under ICC Profiles, you will want to remove any mention of Samsung.  You should have an item (also under ICC Profiles) called sRGB IEC61966-2.1 which is what you want to use instead.  I had it.  If you don’t you may want to look over that thread to see if there is better advice than merely “add it”.

Now let’s change the background color.  This is done (let’s have some fun!) through the registry editor.  Run regedit (pressing Windows-R will open the run dialog, or you can type regedit into the search field in your Start menu).

Navigate to this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER ——> Software ——> Microsoft ——>  Windows Photo Viewer ——> Viewer

Right-click in the right-hand pane and choose New ——> DWORD (32-bit) Value.  This will create a new item which you will call Backgroundcolor and then give a hexadecimal value which corresponds to your preferred background color (black is ff000000 which is really ff followed by the color black and I’m not clear why the ff is needed—don’t shot the messenger).

Depending upon your Backgroundcolor choice you may want to either create or alter your Textcolor key as well.  Follow the same above procedure for creating the key or if it already exists merely double-click it to change the hex number.

(I believe using HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER will change this for all users, but I have not tested this.)

Have fun with that.