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Hi,
I just bought a Spyder5Express and have been trying to profile 2 monitors and the images displayed using the new profiles are inferior to the Apple factory default profiles. The colors in the DisplayCAL and factory profiles are very similar, but images shown with DisplayCAL profiles are subdued — they are not as bright and the blacks are squashed.
The displays are a 13-inch MacBook Pro Retina (late 2013) running High Sierra, and a 20-inch Apple Cinema Display (circa 2003). One of the images I use to compare is is this one from colourspace.xyz, viewed in the Apple Preview app. The last 3 or 4 black squares are not distinguishable and the model’s black dress loses a lot of detail compared to the Apple default profile on both monitors.
I have repeated the profiling at least a half-dozen times to make sure I didn’t make mistakes. Running at different ambient light levels from a darkened room to daylight with shades drawn (didn’t make any difference). I used the LCD (generic) mode for the laptop display at first, then changed to LCD (white LED)— didn’t make any difference. I used the LCD (CCFL) mode for the Cinema display first, then tried LCD (CCFL type 2) — didn’t make any difference. All other settings were initially default: 6500K/Gamma 2.2. In this setup there’s little calibration to be done. The laptop display has a brightness slider: I set it to about 120 candelas to begin and never touched it again. The Cinema display doesn’t even have a brightness control.
I found some information on the Argylle site about squashed blacks, so I tried to change some settings as best I could understand the advice. With an sRGB tone curve, 100 lux ambient light, Black output offset changed to 0, and CIECAM02 gamut mapping turned on, I was able to get some improvement, but it was barely perceptible, and still the image was not nearly as good as the factory profiles.
About the only thing I have to show for all this time invested is a newfound confidence in my ancient Cinema display — it is not nearly as decrepit as I assumed it might be. (Well, both displays actually).
Am I missing something? Or should I just declare victory and retreat?
Hi,
any Apple applications like Preview can currently be considered unsuitable for color critical work due to longstanding bugs in those applications – there is a work-around available, see https://hub.displaycal.net/forums/topic/dark-images-in-mac-photos-preview-with-displaycal-generated-profile/page/2/
Thanks! I haven’t had time to try creating a profile yet with the suggested single curve+matrix, but I did try another experiment. I looked at my sample image in Affinity Photo, and it looks great with the DisplayCal profiles I created. Much better than the default Apple one. So the problem is indeed with Profile.
I had seen a suggestion to use single curve + matrix in this tutorial, but I ignored it, because; who would have thought the Apple apps would have such serious bugs?
thanks a lot for pointing me in the right direction.
