Forcing brightness down on new iMacs (too bright)

Hmm, I don't doubt you, but that is very strange, especially that color eyes wouldn't do it. DId you try in a totally dark room? I've been hearing that gives the most accurate results with these new imacs.

Do post back about how the prints come out, please.

Actually, I don't have the newest 24, but the 1 before. I'm one of those that doesn't like the glossy, and in any event the one I have is working wonderfully well and doing the job. I have to find out the deal with color eyes because, I was doing something wrong, it may be more complicated than I realized. When I started to profile, it just went full screen white and hung up eventually giving me an error. So I don't know if I was giving it the wrong info. Not sure whether to call my screen a brightness only screen or an Apple screen also I have to check if its 8 bit or 12. I screwed up somehow.
But the color vision with the shades did profile. You have to do the shades during the profiling to get accuracy. Your correct that if you profile, then apply it, you will be getting a false sense. Will post back after printing.

yep, impossible to properly calibrate the glossy imac 24" at 120cd/m2. How come apple is so dumb as to put out such a thing? Don't they know people use it for photography/video? I will call it the "Sunglasses iMac" from now on since I need to use shades to work with it (probably the guys at apple did use shades when they put it together too!).

One thing that might work is color eyes, which has a special plug-in for reducing luminance on apple displays. But it's A. really expensive, and B. requires you do a relative rather than absolute calbration to adjust luminance.

Barbara, I'm please to relate that I just had some mini-books printed by Apple directly out of Aperture after calibrating as I said above, and they came back, surprisingly accurate not only in color but in tonality both color and duo - sepia toned, with perhaps in certain lighting, a slight, really slight magenta cast barely visible in certain tones of grey. Really quite good. I'm stoked.. I took out all magenta in the B/w files and resubmitted to get about 20 copies. Anyways, theres the outcome. The color photos look amazingly like they do on the screen, I'm really pleasantly surprised. Was better'n I hoped for.

About the brightness plug-in, I believe I have that, and I think it may work similarly to the way shades does. You know for me the theory isn't as important as the results, so right now, I'm pretty stoked with how it worked.

Message was edited by: Barry Fisher

Message was edited by: Barry Fisher

Great, Barry! I'm glad you got it set up to suit you. I just tried the new version of iMatch that came out this week and it did a dreadful job on my white 24", much worse than the previous version ever did, so I need to roll back, i guess.

Hello:
In my studio of desing we have macs, and a new iMac 24", and i see tha it is very very hot display, Shades is working in the Mac.

But i wont a new mac and i was thinking about buy a new iMac 24" but it is so bright!!! 😟

Is the 20" better?

Supposidly the 20" is worse for critical work than the 24". There's some discussion about what the monitor manufacturer specs are in the thread "eye popping comparison" in the "your intel iMac display" forum here.

Some say they are using a 6 bit monitor with dithering to simulate 16.5 million colors of an 8 bit monitor and therefore it in non a true 8 bit monitor and therefore very difficult to properly calibrate. May be able to make it useful, but not "industry standard for color proofing useful".

The 24" Glossy has a better monitor spec. It is true 8 bit and can take, with some work, an acceptable calibration though it is not as good as the last generation iMac 24" or the ACD in that respect. See my post above. A lot of people complained about the brightness of the last generation 24" monitor when they came out, and many found ways to reduce with shades or brightness control, etc. But Barbara is right, that just changing the brightness alone by itself doesn't give your monitor a proper profile for printing and you will have empericlly match results by changing color adjustments in your editing software until it looks "right". As I stated above, I think I found a way to use shades DURING the calibration process so that the profile generated is accurate for the screen brightness I set with shades. This worked great for my last generation 24" imac.

For the new glossy generation:

Color eyes with a colimeter can change the brightness during the calibration and give you an acceptable result, you may have to calibrate in darkness for best results and they will be good enough for most photo uee, though still not up to last generation's screen.

I had Color Vision softwqre with the Spyder 2 Pro and I found a way to use shades, during the profile to get a very accurate profile at 120L which is about what you want for matched results. I don't see why that method won't work on the glossy screen as well.

Good luck.

Message was edited by: Barry Fisher

I just wanted to add that going from MAX. brightness to the next level down is a big jump in lowering the brightness but then each increment lower yields very subtle changes. After the first step down, the brightness control isn't scaling brightness down in large enough increments. I would like the lowest brightness setting to be equivalent to the setting when the screen dims to a very low level to save energy as set in the display preferences. This should be fixable in a simple driver update but I would like Apple to be aware of the issue so I am posting here.

Message was edited by: robby818

The best way to make apple aware is to send feedback directly:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/imac.html

I agree, BTW. My old G4 imac went from max brightness to almost 0 with the control and I hate that the newer computers don't, as well.

I have just installed this - excellent too, thanks for the tip. BTW is there any possiblity that this application will damage the hardware itself because of the way it works - taking the brightness outside its actual setting range?

There is no problem with damaging hardware. It doesn't actually change the brightness of the backlights, it overlays a graphics filter to darken the screen image. By doing this it does reduce the colour depth of the display.

Hi Barry, I just got a refurbed iMac (came with 2 silent upgrades: 2.33 ghz bump and the 7600 video card: thank you apple!) I use Shades and I am ready to profile the monitor with my Monaco Optix XR. I'm not sure how to get the monitor to 120 as you say in your post. Do I turn on Shades, start profiling, and it will tell me what the "number" of my brightness is?

thx