Windows 10 Tip: How To Turn On Color Filters to Grayscale Your Whole Desktop

11

Color Filters is now officially introduced at the system level in Windows 10 build 16215, an insider build for Fall Creators Update. It includes color filters designed to make the life easier for people with color blindness to differentiate colors like red and green. It also helps for those with light sensitivity to create and consume content.

It’s built as part of Ease of Access category. Since it works at the system level, the color filter can be applied to the entire desktop, regardless of what applications are running, 3rd party tools or built-in ones.

The color filters that are available in Windows 10 include:

  • Grayscale
  • Invert
  • Grayscale Inverted
  • Deuteranopia
  • Protanopia
  • Tritanopia

To enable Color Filters, simply press Win + Ctrl + C keyboard shortcut once and it colorized your whole desktop at once. Press the same key combination again to disable it. Out of the box, it grayscales your desktop like below:

Windows 10 color filters desktop - Windows 10 Tip: How To Turn On Color Filters to Grayscale Your Whole Desktop

To change the default color filter, open Settings app, go to Ease of Access and Color and high contrast. Then select a filter that suits your eyes from the drop-down list.

Settings easy of access color - Windows 10 Tip: How To Turn On Color Filters to Grayscale Your Whole Desktop

Again, as mentioned early, it’s easier to just use the keyboard shortcut Win + Ctrl + C to toggle the Color Filter on and off.

Also, if you are a fan of tweaking Windows registry, you can use the following registry tweak to configure Windows 10’s Color Filters as well, thanks to Winaero.

Open Registry Editor and go to the following key location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\ColorFiltering

Create or modify two DWORD-32 values on the right panel, Active and FilterType.

Registry Editor color filters - Windows 10 Tip: How To Turn On Color Filters to Grayscale Your Whole Desktop

The Active value is to enable or disable the Color Filters feature and the FilterType is to set which color filter to us based on the table below:

  • 0 = Greyscale
  • 1 = Invert
  • 2 = Greyscale Inverted
  • 3 = Deuteranopia
  • 4 = Protanopia
  • 5 = Tritanopia

Disable the shortcut key to turn on the color filters

If you are on Windows 10 Inside builder 17083 or around that build, you will see an option that can disable the shortcut key that toggles the color filter on or off.

Open Setting app, go to Ease of Access and Color filters. Clear the option “Allow the shortcut key to toggle filter on or off” to disable it. It takes effect right away.

Settings easy of access color disable shortcut key - Windows 10 Tip: How To Turn On Color Filters to Grayscale Your Whole Desktop

11 COMMENTS

  1. Thank you! Accidentally hit the hotkey for this without knowing and was stuck in greyscale hell until I found your article!

  2. OMG YOU SAVED ME!!! I WAS ABOUT TO REINSTALL WINDOWS AND I WAS ALREADY BACKING UP MY FILES AND THOUGH, “WHY NOT GIVE IT ANOTHER GOOGLE!” AND YOU ACTUALLY SAVED ME!!!!!

  3. thank you for this. i had no idea why my screen went grayscale after dropping my wireless keyboard from the couch. it was driving me nuts! i reinstalled video drivers, restarted and nothing. the login was in color, and install screens were in color.

  4. Oldish post, I know, but does anyone know how to disable the keyboard shortcut that turns this grayscale filter on. I somehow hit it on a regular occasion (normally trying to copy something with ctrl-c – and I know where to go to restore my settings but I am NEVER going to want to apply grayscale to my computer!!!! Any ideas?

  5. If only you could make it so Windows would make one screen black and white and the other greyscale, that would be perfect for what I’m doing right now

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here