Image looks dull in Eye of GNOME

Problem

I recently discovered a strange problem with Eye of GNOME (EOG), which is the default image viewer on Ubuntu. A JPEG image that looked bright and colorful in GIMP was rendered as dull and washed out in EOG. In fact, the photo looked great in Feh, ImageMagick Viewer, Shotwell and gThumb image viewers. It only looked bad in EOG, so this was definitely a problem with this viewer.

Solution

It turns out that this is a bug in EOG as described here. The solution suggested is to remove the ICC color profile of the display. This can be done by this command:

$ xprop -root -remove _ICC_PROFILE

After I tried this command, the image was rendered correctly in EOG! 😊

Tried with: Eye of GNOME 3.10.2 and Ubuntu 14.04