Problems profileing a mac screen.

[F. IJ]

Hi guys,

I’ve been very busy calibratingh my screens the last few days. When I tried to calibrate the screen of my Macbook Pro i stumbled upon a weird problem however. The profiles I made in Displaycal seem like they have a way too low gamma in all applications and foto’s viewed in finder (by pressing spacebar). The shadows are lifted way up and eveything doesn’t look like I think it was intended by my camera. I tried viewing a few photos in my iPhone (which was measured to have a gamma of almost 2.2 by Displaymate) and it indeed shows darker shadows and a much more natural image. Setting the gamma to 2.4 before calibrating also makes no difference whatsoever to the profile. The weird thing is however that when I view pictures using the preview app, all the shadows are suddenly way to dark and everything is crushed. This is also the same for both profiles (set to gamma 2.2 and 2.4). I tried calibrating using the Datacolor Software (I use the spyder 4) and while the gamma 2.2 profile showed the same lightness overall, the gamma 2.4 looked much more natural (and more like the photo’s look on my other devices. This profile also makes the photos look the same no matter how I view them. What is happening?

[Florian Höch]

Hi,

The profiles I made in Displaycal seem like they have a way too low gamma in all applications and foto’s viewed in finder

Compared to what?

The weird thing is however that when I view pictures using the preview app, all the shadows are suddenly way to dark and everything is crushed.

This is a known bug in Preview. Don’t use it if you care about accurate color.

[F. IJ]

Compared to how my camera shows my photos or how my iPhone shows my photos. I know the iPhone is not calibrated but as I mentioned it is tested to have a 2.2 gamma, so how can that look so different?

[Florian Höch]

Did you use default settings? Try rotating the instrument 90 degrees.

[F. IJ]

Well I tried standard as in the default settings for srgb, as setting whitepoint target does not really give the right results as the display doesn’t have RGB controls. I did download a correction for the Spyder 4 and a macbook screen but that did very little. I will try rotating the instrument 90 degrees, but what should that do?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by F. IJ.

[Florian Höch]

I will try rotating the instrument 90 degrees, but what should that do?

Some instruments seem to have problems with LCD polarization filter alignment in some cases.

[F. IJ]

I tried it and it made very little difference. Also, why does calibrating to 2.4 show no difference?

[Florian Höch]

Also, why does calibrating to 2.4 show no difference?

Because on Mac OS X, the whole desktop is color managed. Only changing the calibration whitepoint will have an effect.

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