How To Disable Dynamic Tile Color in Windows 8.1

[somanywhales]

Just upgraded to 8.1 and noticed the new dynamic tile color feature. For non-metro apps, it seems that there's some algorithm that picks out the "primary" color of your legacy icons, then makes the tile background a similar color.

This has the benefit of making tile backgrounds for non-metro programs more colorful, but the algorithm really seems to like a particularly hideous shade of orange, and it also makes no effort to avoid picking tile colors that cause your icons to disappear into the tile background. There are certain tiles on my start screen where you actually can't even see anything but a solid orange or purple or blue tile with a vaguely discernable shape in the middle.

It's a headache, and I would love it if I could just turn this thing off. The neutral tones of the Windows 8 tile colors were far preferable.

Someone please tell me they found a registry value that I can change/destroy so that I don't cringe whenever I hit the start button.

 

[mdmd]

(not the solution you were looking for but...)
If you don't like dynamic tile colors (or default tiles), don't use them.
Make your own with oblytile.

 

[JayPeg]

any luck?

 

[Hopachi]

The algorithm in question is hidden in the system and it pretty much looks like the one for window border but has other preferences.
Wonder where that would be... for instance to bring the dynamic colored window borders in Win7, you need to use Aura which uses a related algorithm for color but the developer(s) of the program had to build that from scratch by using the Windows API (you have useful color methods for that) I guess.

For tiles, see the Start Screen Dev Center reference:
Windows.UI.StartScreen namespace (Windows)

Not sure if that gets us further in the matter, but developers would know.

any luck?

For the moment: use OblyTile. You use PNG's and can create your own colored tiles/icons or download good sets from DeviantArt, like dakirby309's set.