Starting Google Chrome leads to altered display colours – why?

When I start Google Chrome (seen from 38.0.2125.111 to 42.0.2311.135 (64-bit)) on my 15" Mid-2010 MBP (NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M) on OS X Yosemite (10.10 to 10.10.3) the display often (not just the displayed browser) changes to a much cooler colour, as if I had set a different colour profile. (The colour profile in the settings remained the same) When I shut down Chrome, everything looks as expected again. What's the reason and how can I prevent this behaviour?

Update: GFX shows that when starting Chrome the graphics switch to the discrete graphic card. When I disable this, nothing changes anymore. Turning off the discrete graphics might circumvent the problem, but it is no solution.

Have you tried resetting the SMC?

1. Shutdown your Mac
2. Connect the power cable
3. Press and hold the LEFT Alt + Ctrl + Shift keys
4. While still holding the keys above, press the power button

Besides that, could you check what color profiles you have installed and report back? Removing faulty profiles and rebooting might help solve your issue as well.

1. Open Finder
2. Press Cmd + Shift + G
3. Type /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays and press Go

Update: installing a tool that prevents graphic card switching could likely help you as well, though I'd keep that as a fallback option. GFX does a great job at that.

This is a bit of guesswork, as I don't have a dual GPU machine to test with - but this works across even different computers using the same screen.

The difficulty may be in persuading the system to swap profiles at the same time as it swaps GPUs.

The way to do this accurately would be with a hardware colorimeter, designed to test & balance the screen, then save a new custom profile.
The 'quick test' to see if that would be worthwhile & if the profile swap can be automated, would be to attempt to manually colour balance for each card & test if the profile swap can be done - either automatically or at least manually without too much effort.

You can use gfxCardStatus to force the GPUs to switch for testing.

Then use System Prefs > Displays > Color > Calibrate... & attempt to manually calibrate for each card.
If you can get it close enough to match each GPU manually, then all you need is to check the switching mechanism - whether the system will switch over automatically with the GPU.

If the switchover is automatic, or even an acceptable manual switch, but you cannot get the 2 GPUs to match closely enough by eye, then the hardware colorimeter would be the only way to get closer.
They are not cheap - entry level would be 80 - 100 bucks for something like a ColorMunki Smile, next up would be something like the Spyder
[If you're Googling for colorimeters, don't get the HueyPro, it no longer works with Yosemite.]