MacBook Pro Display too yellow compared to Studio Display

Ah! There it is. I was trying to find it earlier from my iPad, and trying to navigate the site from there was a pain in the butt. You can tell it won't be available for much longer, though. Or they wouldn't have it so steeply discounted.

Man... Everything is so counterintuitive and complicated for no reason.

Agreed. Apple's new color management system left almost no room for professionals to do their own monitor calibration/profiling. They very simply cannot do that as there is no monitor in the world that will hold its original output for its entire lifetime. And they cannot assume a user even wants to use any of the presets.

At least this only applies to Apple's own panels. You can still calibrate/profile any third party monitor however you want.

That's a fairly old model, and I don't think it could handle the response of the Studio Display's panel.

Looking around, I can find some of their stuff in Canada, though everything is priced higher. Here's the item you initially tried to order, but from a Canadian vendor.

https://www.nhsmediastore.com/EODIS3.aspx

Same item on the Canadian Amazon site.

https://www.amazon.ca/Calibrite-ColorChecker-Display-Pro-CCDIS3/dp/B0973JMM4S/ref=sr_1_2?crid=JCSPWCQF6E79&keywords=calibrite%2Bcolorchecker%2Bdisplay%2Bpro&qid=1693767622&sprefix=calibrite%2Bdisplay%2Caps%2C208&sr=8-2&th=1

I found a few of the new line, but they're even more.

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.

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.

Yet more background reading. I hadn't looked into what other people thought of the Studio Display. Turns out, a good three fourths of the reviews I looked at under various tech websites and YouTube reviews think the monitor isn't very good.

https://markellisreviews.com/apple-studio-display-review-is-it-worth-it/

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/smart-office/apple-studio-display-monitor-review/

https://www.theverge.com/22981744/apple-studio-display-5k-monitor-webcam-speakers-review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoigsHYc77s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw65SS3AveM

Reviews are, of course, someone's opinion. But they are also the opinions of people who work with and review lots of various hardware for a living. And there are also a number of reviews where they love this monitor. It's like going to Amazon. You can look up literally any item sold there, and no matter how good something is overall, it will have at least a couple of 1 star reviews.

What's the biggest advantage to the Studio Display? It's one of the few good 5K displays available. Video production folks love having a monitor that can display an entire 4K video, and still have room for your app's various palettes.

But honestly, if I were to determine what I should return, I would send the monitor back and get an LG 5K. Or if you didn't mind stepping down to a 4K panel, then the Alogic monitor mentioned earlier appears to be an excellent choice. Which, in an almost unheard of fashion, currently has no negative reviews on Amazon. But then, there's only 13 reviews so far. So give it time. At least one is bound to show up eventually.

Just to add more info about how we see color, and how we rate it.

I previously stated the sun is 6500K. That was from very old notes I keep. That has since been updated by scientists. The sun's direct measurement is 5900K. So, there we are for the sake of accuracy on that subject.

Now regarding my other statements. Art is indeed wrong, and this is not only my opinion. No, we do not normally view the world in 6500K color. Read the following. In both links, it confirms what I've already stated. 5200K is normal daytime color. 6500K only comes in when the sun is filtered by an overcast sky. Why so blue that way? For the same reason lakes and the oceans look blue. Clouds are made up of water and filter out red and green more than blue.

https://www.fullspectrumsolutions.com/pages/what-is-natural-lighting

https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/kelvin-scale-breakdown-color-temperature

Now how in the world did I miss you purchased an XDR model of the display? It's right there in your first post. All the while I thought it was the standard model.

Anyway, then yes, X-Rite is correct that only their latest monitor profiling hardware can handle that panel. It's not that the one you had wouldn't work at all, but the results wouldn't be very accurate.

Also agreed with the next statement. Which is essentially the same thing I said. Your displays would be very close after profiling each to the same target settings, but not necessarily dead-on perfect.

Since your Studio Display is new, it should hold decently accurate color for at least 3 months. 6 months is not out of the question. Newer monitors don't drift anywhere near as quickly as the early LCD and LED monitors did.

What I would suggest is to at least duplicate one of the presets and set it to a luminance of 80. The brighter a monitor (or TV) is, the sooner it will lose its original color range.

I need more sleep, or something. Misread your initial post - again. There is an XDR version of the Studio Display, but you have the less expensive model. Regardless, X-Rite's info still stands. Only the newer colorimeters can properly handle that display.

I had figured the X-Rite device you purchased could likely work since it's just one generation model back. I looked up the specs and now see why it can't work. The ColorChecker Display Pro tops out at 1000 nits. Not enough to profile those newer panels.

That looks good to me. I do wish I could actually see one of these monitors rather than making all of my statements and suggestions based on reading technical data. More than that, I could then fully test how to create my own profiles and pass on the steps.

In this case, 80 refers to lumens.

To be that difficult to view, I'm assuming you're in a brightly lit room and thereby washing out the screen.

Whether doing photo retouching or video production, professionals work in dimly lit rooms. This is partly to cut down on glare and helps to hide any unwanted surround color. For video work, it's also to help simulate the way most people view their TV at home.

As an example, draw all of the window shades and only have enough side lighting on for comfortable, but muted viewing of the rest of the room. When I'm doing color work, the only light on is the D50 viewing booth next to me. The only window has room darkening curtains that are kept closed. This makes a lumen setting of 80 plenty bright enough to work on, and blocks all other light sources that are not D50.

Good find! So, it appears the expert mode screen for the newer displays is an entirely different spot.

At least you found it, but the overall problem remains. Only the user can see what's happening on the screen. The OS is only guessing what it looks like.