MacBook Pro Display too yellow compared to Studio Display

No matter what I do, the colours don't match at all between my Apple Studio Display and my MacBook Pro.

And you will, literally, never get there trying to do this by eye.

I tried the Reference Modes. Not only are they too dark, they don't look AT ALL the same on the Studio Display and the MacBook Pro.

I also tried the "Fine-Tune Calibration" mode; I was expecting being able to calibrate my monitors like before with the little sliders and everything (Display Calibrator Assistant), but all I'm getting are input boxes...

The built-in Calibration function, as I've already stated, is a complete waste of time. It can only guess what your monitor looks like. When you start the function, it clears the LUT and displays what it can only assume is a perfect 6500K, 2.2 gamma display with a predetermined luminance value.

That might be a fairly accurate guess if the monitor is less than a month or two old. After that, forget it.

Again, no matter what I do, both displays look very different. I'm not expecting them to be 100% identical, but I'm expecting my brand new 7000$ set-up to be a little more plug and play than that.

My EIZO CG279X monitor alone cost $2,300, and I still know it needs to be calibrated and profiled on a regular, scheduled basis.

All monitors drift. There are no exceptions. Doesn't matter how much you paid for it. In an almost 100% manner, LCD and LED monitors tend to drift pink as they age. When you eyeball it back to what looks neutral to you, the OS sees you're adding green. It has no idea why, even though you know it's to counteract the pink cast. The OS only knows you seem to like a greenish gray balance, and that's what you printed grays will look like.

I've been spending countless hours trying to figure things out with no success. As I said, I see the differences mainly when I'm on Safari, TextEdit, or when I'm on the Finder with windows open; the big white windows show the warmth and brightness differences the most. However, when I open my photos in Photoshop, they seem almost identical on both screens. 🤷‍♂️

And that's just one problem with a non-color managed monitor. Some apps don't work well with ColorSync. Others, not at all. On any monitor that has not been properly calibrated and profiled, there's no telling what each app will display.

I'm at a loss. I can't spend more money buying a monitor calibrator. I just want both displays to be closer in appearance than THAT:

Sooooo, you've spent 7 grand on your Mac setups, but you won't spend less than $300 to properly color manage the displays? If you ever expect them to match, you need a monitor profiling system. If you ever expect to get professional color results, there's no way around it.

The Calibrate function can only guess at what you're doing. It has no clue - at all - what the monitor's gamut, color range, gray balance, or anything else actually looks like. In other words, it's pointless to even use it.

A monitor profiling system knows exactly what the panel response is. That's what the hardware is for.

So still no Display Calibration Assistant – Expert Mode to be found.

From what I've been able to determine, you won't find that for a Studio Display. You can only tweak the reference presets and call that a "calibration". But, it should be there for the MacBook Pro. One can't affect the use of the other.

I use Photoshop to work on my calligraphy photos … I tried the Design & Print (P3-D50) preset on both displays, and everything is VERY yellow (the MacBook Pro being even more yellow).

That is a common reaction I get when people try D50. Yes, it does look yellow at first (and for at least a few days), because you're so used to looking at the ridiculously blue color of 6500K. Give your brain time to realize what you're looking at is neutral gray, not yellow.

Per the earlier example of looking out your window, you can do the same thing with a book. Take any book or magazine that uses a good quality paper and view it under normal sunlit conditions. Compare the white of that paper to a 6500K screen. It will be incredibly obvious the book looks nothing like the screen, and never will. Nothing under natural sunlight looks that blue. Ever.

When I use the default Apple Display (P3-600 nits) preset on my Studio Display and the default Apple Display (P3-600 nits) on my MacBook Pro, my photos are magenta/blue on my Studio Display, and magenta/yellow on my MacBook Pro. Also, the default presets are very hard on my eyes.

That comes right back to the presets heavily pushing the gray balance towards blue (6500K). It's also why they're so bright. Those presets push the luminosity way past where it should be. As far as not looking the same with the same settings, we've known that from the very beginning. It's also nothing unusual. Not even a little. Different panels, different color responses. That's where a real calibrator comes in, like the X-Rite unit.

My iPhone is yellow. My girlfriend's iPhone is red. My iPad is blue. My girlfriend's iPad is pretty much neutral.

Normal. iOS devices are not meant to be used for serious color work. They just aren't. There's no method to truly color calibrate them. Only a simple slider in the settings to change the overall balance between warm and cold.

Knowing all of this, it's very difficult for me to know where to position myself and what references are good and what workflow is to be trusted.

I know this is going to sound like a broken record, but you truly need a monitor calibrator. It is literally the only way you will get your monitors to match. It's also the only way the OS will know what the color response of each monitor is since it's directly measured by the device instead of being nothing more than a guess.

At the moment, all I want is for my calligraphy photos to display correctly on the Web (Flickr, Instagram, etc.).

Ah, there's a catch you can't do anything about. Once you have your monitors properly calibrated and profiled, the color on the web will look the same - to you. For anyone else? It will be affected by how well or badly their monitors are set. You can't do anything about the millions of uncalibrated monitors in the world. You can only control your end so it is correct.

Does the X-Rite device offer a user setting for my needs?

Yes. It's all in the video. Though they make it more complicated than necessary by going through the entire method of setting a white point's x y values. If you simply choose D50 from the menu, those values are already correctly and automatically set. You don't need to waste your time manually futzing with the values.

See if night shift is turned on on your MacBook, you might want to turn that off

Hope this helps!

Search the Settings/Preference for "Night Shift"

It sounds like you require professional color control. You'll never get that trying to use any of the canned monitor profiles, or trying to do anything with the built-in Calibrate function.

Purchase a device meant for the job. Either an X-rite or DataColor product. In either case, I would not recommend the cheapest version.

For accurate color, never - and I mean never - use the idiotic default 6500K setting. True color professionals use D50, which is slightly different from 5000K, along with a 1.8 gamma setting. The latter being more important to the printing industry since that gamma setting much more closely resembles what you can put on paper. But if you intend to try and match your screen to print output for artwork, then definitely use 1.8.

Preferred settings:

Luminance - no higher than 80. Your monitor should look like a well lit piece of paper. Not a flashlight.

White point - D50

Gamma - 1.8

Yes. That's part of the entire point of using them.

The X-Rite systems are typically more advanced. Such as, you can profile one monitor, then save a reference file. Bring that file to all of the other displays in your business and have the software match each monitor (as closely as possible), to the reference data.

Or, just calibrate and profile each display using the exact same settings. They should be at least nearly indistinguishable from each other.

If you're in the printing industry, or will do any CMYK work for them at all, then a properly calibrated monitor goes past important to extremely important. The CMYK black color balance in Photoshop is based on your monitor's settings. Using a D50 color balance for the monitor, you get a perfect CMYK gray balance in Photoshop.

With a 6500K setup, the balance would be something more like 80, 79, 55, 95. Very blueish/purplish. Your clients will not be happy that everything that's supposed to be neutral gray, isn't.

Okay, that made me look. As I suspected, Apple made this as unintuitive as possible. And much more difficult than necessary.

You can't get anywhere because Fine-Tune Calibration is grayed out. In order to activate it, you need to choose a different reference mode. These are the modes you can select from:

• Apple Display (P3-600 nits)
• HDTV Video (BT.709-BT.1886)
• NTSC Video (BT.601 SMPTE-C)
• PAL and SECAM Video (BT.601 EBU)
• Digital Cinema (P3-DCI)
• Digital Cinema (P3-D65)
• Design and Print (P3-D50)
• Photography (P3-D65)
• Internet and Web (sRGB)

Since you're doing professional color work, the only logical choice is Design and Print (P3-D50). But that is going to be a preset that you're eyeballing color on. Not measuring with an instrument. And as noted earlier, useless as the monitor ages since it WILL drift away from neutral.

Apple provides their own profiling software for the Studio Display, which I presume behaves similarly to the software that comes with the X-Rite and DataColor products. But you then still need to go out and purchase a spectro device to measure the screen. Apple's software supports these models:

• Photo Research SpectraScan PR-740, PR-745 or PR-788
• Colorimetry Research CR-300

And to say these are overkill isn't even a close description. Check out the eye watering price on the CR-300. I haven't found a price on the SpectraScan units, but you probably don't want to know what they are.

If the Studio Display were my monitor, I'd set it to the P3-D50 reference, then calibrate and profile it from there with the X-Rite device.

Or, quite honestly, return it and get an EIZO monitor. And while I can use my i1 Pro 3 spectro along with i1 Profiler to calibrate and profile my CG279x, the EIZO ColorEdge monitors come with a built-in colorimeter and their own profiling software. It's all there, ready to use without purchasing anything separate from the monitor.

I was wondering that myself. The new method Apple uses for their display panels is too restrictive and is getting in the way of users trying to do their own calibrations.

I also just realized yesterday that's what's going on with the MacBook Pro. It's using the same new reference settings rather than the old calibration method - normal or expert mode.

Yes, as I mentioned, you can skip most of the over-the-top steps the video leads the viewer through. Just choose D50 and tell it what luminance you want. He chose 80, which is also what I use. Proceed to how many patches you want it to read (more results in a more accurate profile) and go.

The ColorNavigator software that comes with the EIZO monitors automates all of this. You put in your choices and it does everything. All you have to do is sit back and watch until it's done.

But, I have also calibrated/profiled the monitor using i1 Profiler along with my i1 Pro 3 PLUS spectrophotometer just to see how close the results would be to each other.

As some in the video comments asked, how do you control the brightness so you can get it to your target range? With i1 Profiler, I opened the System settings so the monitor brightness slider was visible. I'd Command+Tab to that, move it a bit and then Command+Tab back to i1 Profiler so it could get the current brightness reading from the spectro. Then you just bounce back and forth with Command+Tab until you have it set correctly.

But it sure sounds like Apple's new system is getting in the way. You go through all of your work and then the OS snaps the monitor back to a reference preset. The only way I could test this issue would be by hooking up a Studio Display to my M2 Pro mini so I'd be working with the same setup. But I have no way of doing that without purchasing a Studio Display or borrowing one. The first I won't do as I already have a high end monitor, and the latter I can't do as I don't know anyone who owns a Studio Display.

You could indeed save about a $100 by getting a ColorChecker Display Pro from various places that still have old stock. As far as X-Rite is concerned, these are obsolete, which is why I didn't mention them. You'll only find the new, replacement devices at calibrate.com . Not that the previous models won't work. They certainly would and would be a good price.

I don't even know where to start. For being an "expert", his answers are just plain wrong. For perspective, I started doing image retouching and color about 6 years before there even was such a thing as Photoshop 1.0 on Scitex workstations. My job has been all about accurate color rendition on computers for the past 45 years.

They have different LCD panel and backlight, this is expected for color not to match even with the best of them.

That's what I already knew was going on there. But it doesn't matter. That's what a good colorimeter is for. To make the color between different monitors match. I used to do this for my main client. I'd go in and calibrate/profile all of their monitors. When done, you could go from one to the next - all different types and brands of monitors - and they would match. Was there any difference at all? Sure, but very, very slight. You can't expect absolute perfection with different types of hardware, but you can still get it extremely close.

Some truth to that but there are too many variables and what those people didn't tell you is that human vision sees the most color at D65 not D50.

I guess I'm in the "those people" group? Sorry, but he's wrong. As I explained earlier, X-Rite measured noon day sunlit color around the globe at or near sea level, and came up with a 5200K average. To say we normally see color at 6500K is flat out nonsense.

To be overly technical, our sun does emit 6500K color - out in space. But by the time it's filtered through our atmosphere, it's 5200K. To be extra technical, normal daylight is given the range of 5000 - 6500 with clear sky (sun overhead). That's what the D in D50 and D65 stands for. Daylight. The 50 and 65 is simply short for 5000 and 6500. Where will you find 6500K with the sun out? If you're standing on top of Mount Everest, that's a pretty good spot.

And then there's our own brains. No matter what the actual Kelvin temperature is, our brains want to try and neutralize a scene. If you take a video camera and set it to balance neutral color in a store, and then walk outside on a cloudy day, the color will appear to be very, very blue. That because the camera was set to balance the color inside, but wasn't allowed to automatically try and rebalance color when moving to different lighting conditions. Our brains do this on the fly. Will it look coolish when you walk outside that the same store? Sure, it's cloudy. But not the type of overly dramatic blue a non-adjusted video would look like. Your brain knows it's cloudy, and doesn't try to create a false image of warmer sunlit color since that would be nonsensical.

You have nothing to lose by at least trying the unit as you already have it in hand. Unless, that is, it would require breaking a seal to open the box and would then disallow your ability to return it. The downside is you will never have a way to correctly calibrate/profile either device since they will never, ever hold perfect color on their own.

This may be an issue with how Apple's Studio Display works with the OS. But I can only guess. However, I have no trouble bringing up Expert Mode.

System Settings > Displays. Nothing unusual here. I presume you see essentially the same thing.

Clicking on the double arrow next to the currently selected profile gets me the typical list of profiles you can choose. Most of which are not monitor profiles at all. Choose Customize at the bottom:

That brings you here:

Holding the Option key and clicking the + button brings up the Calibrator in Expert Mode as expected:

If this isn't working for you, I couldn't tell you why. Other than Apple possibly has some sort of non-standard way of doing things with the Studio Display.

Beyond all that, you complain this is driving you crazy, but won't spend a lousy $300 to get the hardware/software package to do this quickly, and more importantly, correctly. And yes, after spending $7,000 for what you have, $300 is nothing.

And why "correctly". Because you already have a visual mismatch. The only thing expert mode will do for you is allow you to move the Kelvin slider for each monitor so they visually match. But since they already don't match, you'll have to choose a different value for each monitor. The OS has no clue what you're looking at. It will only know you DON'T want the monitors to match.

Throwing out another option that doesn't cost the and arm and leg of an EIZO unit, as they are silly expensive. I love mine, but I won't be buying another one in the future now that I'm retired. I no longer have a need for that kind of color control.

The Alogic monitors get very good reviews. The Alogic Clarity 27" is only $800. An extra $200 adds a built-in webcam, and $200 more above that makes it a touch screen. But really, who the heck wants to put fingerprints on their monitor, and reach across the table to use it. Anyway, it's cheap compared to the EIZO line, and somewhat less than Apple's Studio Display.

The Studio Display can output 600 nits of brightness. The Clarity, 400 nits. But that's irrelevant as both are maximum output values, and no one in their right mind would ever use a monitor cranked up to either of those numbers.

It's a good choice that doesn't break the bank. One of those and an X-Rite monitor profiling package would put you at about $1150. A few hundred less than the price of the Studio Display alone.

And after all of that, you already have the Studio Display, and it wasn't that much more than the Alogic monitor. Just get the X-Rite or DataColor unit, calibrate and profile both of your monitors, and stop driving yourself nuts.

I was doing more reading on the Studio Display the other day. The presets are stored on the monitor's internal firmware. This is also what the EIZO monitors do. There's an advantage to this.

Normally, when you calibrate and profile a monitor, the calibration is stored in the final .icc profile along with the profile data. This calibration data is the LUT (Look Up Table) information, and is what controls the monitor's calibration characteristics. When you choose such a profile, the LUT is loaded to the video hardware.

This works well enough, but doesn't always produce the best vignetting/gradation in images. You can usually see a bit of unwanted banding. Such LUT information is (as I remember) 10 or 12 bit data. When saved in the monitor, it's stored as 16 bit data and produces absolutely smooth vignettes. For such monitors, the profile you create only has the RGB color data. There is no LUT to load to the computer's video card as the LUT is in the monitor.

But anyway, this is a good thing the Studio Display does.

As much as possible, you should have consistent lighting for any type of color work. I use a GTI light box for viewing reflective and color slide/transparency originals. This box is also D50 lighting. My desktop is gray so it matches the gray of the viewing booth. All items around me where I work are also neutral colors. All of this is so your perception of color on the screen is not thrown off by surround color. Such as using a brightly colored picture for your desktop wallpaper. This will throw off what you think the color of your work looks like.

So, having a warm, incandescent light next to you is not a good choice. You can pick up just about any decent 5000K LED bulb that will be close enough to D50 to prevent this color mismatch.

I don't do a lot of it, but I do all of my video work in the same D50 setup. There really isn't a need to work in the video default setup of 6500K. Such as, when I put together a video in DaVinci Resolve, it still looks exactly like the video I worked on when I run the completed MP4 on my 65" OLED TV. You'd think it would like very overly warm since I started with neutral gray for everything instead of 6500K. But DaVinci Resolve intelligently converts the working color into the correct video color space when it outputs the final, composited MP4 (or DVD, or Blu-ray disk).

Absolutely do not work at 160 lumens. Standard for most work is 80 lumens. And I don't know about Apple's Studio Display, but EIZO will not honor its warranty if you run the monitor above 100 lumens. And yes, they know if you did since the monitor itself records and stores the calibration data you've used it under, and for how many hours.

The only thing I haven't been able to find good information on is doing your own profiles. The one video I linked to says yes, it works. But I've read other sites where people have tried doing the same thing on their Studio Display, and instead of the final profile being loaded and used, the display throws it out and snaps back to the preset they started from.

An older iMac I used to work on in a shop I moonlighted at had a similar issue. You'd take the time to calibrate and profile it. At the end, it would load the profile, but incorrectly load the LUT. It wouldn't load the black point, and you'd end up with a weird display that had a D50 white point and middle gray ramp, but a 6500K black point. Drove the owner of the place nuts.

Really wish I could help you more. Presets mean nothing to me. Per one of my earlier statements, and duplicated by X-Rite's help desk, two entirely different panel designs will not look the same even when using the same supposed presets. Different hardware and RGB colorants, different results.

Without one of these displays with Apple's new color system on hand, I can't test how to calibrate and profile them correctly. If I had one, I know I could figure out how to do it and pass the steps on.

On top of that, Apple may be intentionally hiding the old expert mode for this new system because it can't really work. Per previously mentioned, these new panels save the calibration data in the monitor's firmware so it can be full 16 bit, or 32 bit 3-D for smooth gradients. Meaning, there is no LUT stored to the video hardware.

Why does that matter? EIZO monitors do the same thing. So when I calibrate this monitor with their ColorNavigator software, no LUT data is saved with the final profile. No LUT, no calibration curve that loads to video hardware. All three channels are flat.

This matters because Expert Mode expects the monitor to be at 6500K, 2.2 gamma and a fixed, predetermined brightness after it clears the LUT ahead of doing a new calibration, even though it can't know if that's what an external third party monitor actually looks like.

Since the calibration is in the monitor and there's no LUT data to clear, the monitor's appearance doesn't change at all when I go into Expert Mode. Which really throws off what you think you're doing in Expert Mode. When I get to the temperature slider, it assumes I'm looking at 6500K as the starting point.

Which I'm not since the monitor is holding it at D50 (5000K) and a 1.8 gamma.

This makes the entire, original built-in calibration function useless. And given the new presets system on both of your new panels do essentially the same thing as the EIZO monitors, this older function is just as useless for Apple's new display controls for the same reason.

And after all that, I'm still only speculating for Apple's new system. Does regular or expert mode actually work as expected? If so, how would it do that? Logically, it would first have to tell the monitor to load a 6500K preset calibration from its firmware so your manual adjustments at least make some type of sense.