Weird display artifacts after disconnecting from external monitor

Same exact problems here with my Macbook Pro mid-2010 15" ever since Lion. Rather annoying because I plug it in and out of my workstation everyday.

Apple still hasn't released an official fix? Is this something that I can bring up under my warranty? I also get strange glitches when I'm using Photoshop CS5 to draw and I think it may be related. Not rendering my machine useless but still rather annoying.

I had a related interesting thing today. Took some time to fix.

Not enjoying the new Preview.app in lion.

I had around 90 RAW images I wanted to quickly resize, so opend them all in preview.. no problems so far.

When I went to "Adjust Size" it has to duplicate all the open files presumably into memory? and covert them to TIFF.

This is when my macbook pro decided it didnt like that, I only have 6GB of RAM...

Anyway after some magic spinning rainbows, the artifacts started appearing .. mainly on the dock, but also in dialog boxes the text became weird bold.

Not such a problem, apart from I force quit the app before it finishes opening them all, until I reopen the app. When because of the magical 'Resume' it goes through the whole process again.

Anyway, I wonder if my experience sheds any light on things?

@Nicholas Chen- Some times changing profile helps. Are you using a custom profile? I use a colour calibrator to create mine, maybe that has soemthing to do with it?

Think I found the solution in another forum:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=14701406#post14701406

🙂

My display artifacts came back and I reverted to Snow Leopard and they would still happen. The artifacts would eventually lead to the computer crashing, so I brought my MacBook Pro to the apple store and they saw in the stack trace that the crash was due to the video card, so they replaced my logic board. My Mac is still under warranty so it was free of charge.

I am not convinced that replacing the video card is a good long term solution, but hopefully this will fix the problem. I will be getting apple care just invade the new logic board has the same problem, but so far no artifacts.

The solution suggested by "cassiofm" works for me. That is:

1. Delete (backup) files in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays
2. Disconnect and re-connect external Monitor (this will trigger re-creation of monitor profiles). Going to Displays > Color does not btw.

Also see this thread over at AskDifferent.

Same problem here. I use GfxCardStatus by Cody Krieger to switch between the two GPUs which solves the problem for me when connecting to an external monitor. Nevertheless I would prefer a proper fix by Apple - or at least a statement...

For what it's worth: I was having a similar issue on the Macbook 5,1 with the latest Lion updates (10.7.3 at the time of writing).

Upon connecting my external LG monitor, the same artifacts could be found on everything from widgets to pictures viewed in Preview. I was using a MiniDP to HDMI cable.

Instead of going through the deletion of all the profiles, I simply went into Display Preferences, click on the color tab and checked the "show profiles for this display only" box. Selecting the stock profile for my monitor, I clicked on Calibrate. As soon as I made the first adjustment, all artifcats disappeared. I went through the calibration entirely for good measure, saved it under a different name, and have been happy using that ever since.

I didn't need to disconnect my monitor during the process, however the fix continues to work through shutdowns and disconnection of the monitor. A code fix in a future update would be appreciated, but at least for now I can use Photoshop without my eyes exploding.

Judah, that worked perfectly. Thanks so much, that'd been frustrating me for weeks.

slowalk - glad to help. Every so often when I put my mac to sleep or disconnect, I will turn it back on and there will be some residual artifacts. If that is happening to you, I have found two temporary fixes:

1) Wait. I find that the worst of the artifacts will disappear within 15 minutes.

2) Go to the color management tab again and select a different profile. Apply, exit and reopen color management. Select the original profile and apply.

Hopefully there is a REAL fix for this from Apple soon!!!

The solution suggested by bummzack and cassiofm is working for me!

Have not seen the artifacts for about 12 days after recreating the display profile.

Just a feedback. The problem rappeared a few times and disappeared, a lot less than before, but I think maybe my solution wasnt final :/

Hi all,

After taking the calibration process, everything looks fine again in my MBP 5,3 + LG MW228A.

Thanks

I wanted to second the solution from Nicholas Chen. I ran into this problem recently and tried switching between colour profiles in System Preferences->Displays->Color. It seems one particular profile has issues, but the rest seem fine.

I got excited when i noticed there was a new version of my colour calibration software which mentions:

What's Fixed in 4.0.6

- Lion Compatibility

- Serial Number Support

- Permissions issue during installation on some systems

Unfortunately after recalibration, straight away the dock is showing aftifacts. 😟

The app seems to have doubled in size though, and the end result profile has new settings in it.. all very interesting.. but not helpful :S