Matching monitor colors on desktop Mac

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve got an iMac and a new Apple Studio Display. Both are 5K “retina” displays, but there is a noticeable color difference between the two. White, in particular, is not the same - one is (to my eyes, at least) a nice neutral “white white” but the other has an almost greenish cast.

On their own, neither is bad or subjectively wrong. But side by side, it’s obvious. I mucked around in settings and there’s no apparent way to set them the same. The iMac has about three dozen color profiles to pick from, but the Studio Display has presets, rather than profiles. Night Shift and True Tone, and auto brightness are off.

Other than getting my hands on a $16,000 (!) spectroradiometer to actually calibrate things, are there any hidden menus, etc. for finer control of things like white point and gamma?

2

Windows PC user here, and several years ago I got sick of trying to match colors, and bought a Spyder 3 (used then) on ebay, and followed the instructions.

I have a pretty good Dell HD monitor, and I use my gear for Photoshop, and was trying to get results that matched my Epson printer. This was successful - I calibrated my old Win 7 machine, and it has not drifted one little bit. My addition was to scan an x-rite Color Checker card, which actually cost a tad more than the Spyder, and incorporate the scan into a test print file that I run every week, to keep the printer exercised and unclogged. Then I hang the test print on a magnetic board above and behind the monitor, along with the most recent previous print, for visual comparison. These prints are lit with a Phillips 5k LED outdoor flood, (high CRI) controlled by a potentiometer to adjust the light level to “match”, as closely as possible, the output of the monitor, which has already been color managed by the Spyder. I had been doing this for a year or two before I finally thought to save a print for far future reference - just looked, it’s from Sept 2017, and it matches the print I ran a couple of days ago, and, no surprise to me, they match the monitor. Neither the monitor nor the printer have drifted in all these years.

Paint in my computer room isn’t perfect, a light beige, but for Ps work the room is darkened with a blackout roller blind. Your monitors are prob side by side, and you have them slightly angled to meet your eyes as you turn your head? Incident light in your space will fall differently on them, and that can introduce a different color cast to each. Darken that room.

So, you have choices as to the quality (price) of the adjusting equipment you apply to your monitors; I like my Spyder, and with the Color Checker, you might spend a hundred bucks. If you’re not printing you can just hold the Color Checker up for a visual, but being able to adjust the intensity of light falling on the card is desirable.

Key here is a better monitor than you might find at Walmart. My HD Dell is far more responsive to calibration than any low-end thing, some of which won’t adjust very far at all.

Sounds like you have monitor quality cornered.

I wasn’t sure if tou were going to print, or if mis-matched screens bugged you. You should be able to co-ordinate two good screens with calibration. And before someone chimes in with “you can’t match a display (projected light) with a print (reflected light)”, I know, I know. But you can get as close as damnit with the right quality and intensity of light on your print. Really the closeness of the match is just fine, especially since you probably will have little or no control over final print placement and hour-to-hour lighting.

Dan

3

I’m not even trying to match print color to screens - just get two screens to reasonably agree on what “white” is, and maybe the rest of the colors will fall into place.

Spyder is not a listed device that will work with MacOS Ventura. There are four supported devices, and three of them are so obscure, they’re not sold online. The one that is sold online is $16,000 so this is not even remotely suitable for little ol’ me. The stratospheric pricing is part of why I’m suspecting and hoping there’s a hidden menu option somewhere to let people with two screens make them at least reasonably match.

4

Datacolor’s website says they’re compatible. It would be kinda weird if they weren’t as that’s what I’ve always used and pretty much everyone I know uses to calibrate Mac monitors. You don’t need anything that’s $16K.

Spyder X software works on macOS 13 Ventura, macOS 12 Monterey, macOS 11 Big Sur and on macOS 10.15 Catalina.

ETA: I see that you specifically say “device.” I can’t imagine the device not working, but I suppose stranger things have happened.

5

Can you not adjust the white balance and other thingies in your monitor settings for each screen?

6

Let’s hear it for Puly. FWIW, trying to use the built-in adjustments on my Win7 machine was worthless. An advantage to scanning in a Color Checker is you can see just how all the colors display, and it could be that WB is an operator-adjusted setting, where room light will screw with the result.

Dan

7

If you open the display settings and go to the bottom of the list of color profiles, there should be a “Customize…” option at the bottom of the list. I’m still on Monterey so I still have the older (better) System Preferences which is laid out a little different. Then hit the + to launch the Display Calibrator app which will let you tweak the white balance at the very least.

8

I used to be a color reproduction consultant, and while out of that game for a while, I still know a thing or two because I do a lot of film scanning and color correcting for my own personal photography work.

If all you’re finding are $16,000 devices then you’re looking at the wrong thing. Already mentioned up thread, the SpyderX colorimeter s an excellent option. if you really want to dial things in, that’s my recommendation. Even the full-throttle spectrophotometer that I have for calibrating displays and printers is only about $500, not that I think you need this.

I suspect though that you can get where you need to go with an eyeball adjustment to the white balance setting. Others here have made some suggestions on where to look for that in the more recent MacOS versions; I don’t know where off the top of my head.

Edit: while the iMac may have a bunch of possible settings available, without seeing the list, I would expect most of them to not be possible, but not appropriate choices. Stick with the default.

9

Apple likes to hide a lot of useful things in the “Accessibility” settings. There may or may not be something in there that can help you.

10

I currently use a Spyder on Ventura and it works fine.

I haven’t done serious photography in some months now, so I keep ignoring Spyder when it pops up to tell me I haven’t calibrated my monitor recently.

It’s the bee’s knees though. The recent versions do the calibration in a fairly short time, compared to the old versions that would take several minutes of flashing various colors on the screen.

11

OK! I’ll definitely look into Spyders. I was able to find under a “Customize” option to set the iMac display to a D65 whitepoint, and put the Studio display on the Photography P3-D65 preset so the two are a lot closer, but still different enough to bug me.

So now the real question is why Apple’s display calibration app only works with those four esoteric and expensive devices. :exploding_head:

12

Does this process to launch the calibration assistant still work? The screen grabs all show the newer version of the control panel so I’m assuming (hoping?) it would.

https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/color-calibrating-your-macs-display/

13

In those instructions are this nugget of my challenge:

the instructions below apply to most Macs, but if you have one of Apple’s M1 Pro or M1 Max MacBook Pros, with Liquid Retina XDR display, the process is very different. Given the way the displays are calibrated, you can only perform this calibration with a spectroradiometer, an expensive device that most users don’t have.

So apparently a Studio Display is Liquid Retina XDR, hence the need for the $16,000 device instead of the $160-ish device. And also why I didn’t have this challenge with an LG display, but the LG caused kernel panics so it had to go.

14

Nah, that’s out of date. The inexpensive Spyder devices will calibrate that display just fine. There was a short period where the MacOS stuff under the hood interfered with the third party software, but that’s past now.

15

Guess I’m not the only person to be annoyed at different display tech needing different and expensive “official” solutions. An X Pro is on order… Just irritating that by making it simple, people have to spend another $150 on third-party stuff to make $3,000+ worth of hardware look good together.

16

Nah, it’s the same basic panel they’ve been using on the 27" iMacs (and the LG Ultrafine) since they were introduced, but with a little extra brightness and thus some low-level HDR capability. Even the insanely expensive Pro Display XDR isn’t quite “liquid” to the same level as the MacBook Pro’s screens, because it doesn’t have as many local dimming zones, nor does it have 120Hz refresh rate.

17

Then why is it so differently managed than the display in my 27" iMac? Just Apple being Apple, I guess. If it’s the same panel, I wish they could have just used the 27" iMac body so the two could look identical next to each other and be at the same height. And why does the same panel in an LG wrapper cause kernel panics? Apparently something is amiss with LG’s implementation of Thunderbolt, and there was no rhyme or reason to the crashes.

18

Factory calibration has become much more of a feature over time. When the first retina iMacs came out I think they just used generic profiles, but now they’re all being calibrated/profiled in the factory. It’s not so easy to “just make them look the same” when one is much older, so the phosphors and backlight have degraded/shifted, and where manufacturing processes have evolved over time even for the same product.

There’s a lot more to building a screen than just the panel. I think those all come from LG in the first place anyway, but the control boards, circuitry, and as you said, Thunderbolt hardware and software implementation is all separate. There’s a lot to be screwed up, and the Ultrafine is notorious for USB/Thunderbolt/Connection issues, on top of its overall cheap build quality.

19

So far I’ve found that the Spyder does lay a .icc color profile into the mix by some sort of backend magic that users can’t easily do. The screen to screen match now is… better.

But white is still off and the color cast swapped positions - the iMac used to have the “whiter” white and now it’s ever so slightly warmer.

The Spyder has an interesting idea of what a bright room is - all room lights off, no direct light coming in through the window that’s sheltered with the porch roof, and it says the room is “uncontrolled.” Can’t imagine what it would say if I turned the lights on. Maybe I’ll try it again tonight in the dark.

20

I use the displayCAL software, not the Spyder software, with the Spyder for my calibrations:

It gives you finer control, I find, but it is not quite as user friendly as the Spyder software. You could always give that a shot. Or just use your current software and try a few different calibration options and even settings on the monitor itself (many monitors have various hardware color settings you can choose from.) If you have a Spyder X2, you should be able to get closer by using the Studio Matching option, but, yes, it is a bit difficult to get two different monitors to match exactly, especially if they have different backlighting technologies or whatnot. I personally only use one of my monitors for critical color correction, and the other is just a “scratch” monitor, as they are two completely different monitors. It’s a pain in the butt, yes.