Custom Display Presets deleted after OS update

If this actually fixes the problem, Apple owes me a Mac Studio M5 Max :)

BEWARE THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THESE CODES ARE DOING AND WHY IT FIXED MY PROBLEM, BUT YEA PLEASE DO IT WITH CAUTION

So I've been having this problem since forever, basically I bought a used M1 Max MBP 16 inch mid March this year and because I'm a hobby content creator, I want to have a properly set monitor. And then the preset is poof just gone after every restart / shut down, so the past months I've been trying my best to just sleep the laptop.

Long story short, I found this thread and hoped that updates would eventually fixes it, but yea as we see so far, nothing is fixed, so I put the problem into Gemini, telling how can I find an alternative way to fix this, I was thinking of using the "HDR Video P3-ST 2084" preset and fine tune it to 120nits, because that would be my personal preference, and also I told Gemini, about the problem that after every restart, it would remove the "non-native" presets.

And Gemini told me to do this:

Workaround 2: Flush the Corrupted WindowServer Plists The underlying reason this bug occurs specifically on your machine while skipping others is often down to permission conflicts or corruption inside the system’s cache files. You can force macOS to regenerate the display persistence layer from scratch by wiping the preference files via Terminal. Open Terminal and execute the following two commands to kill the broken preference caches:

# Deletes user-specific display configuration
rm ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserver.*.plist

# Deletes system-wide display configuration (Requires admin password)
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist

Crucial Step: Immediately restart your Mac after running these commands. The OS will recreate clean, uncorrupted preference trees upon boot. Set your custom 120-nit Rec. 709 mode after this flush, and test if the persistence holds through a subsequent restart.

After that there was an error telling that "No such file or directory" for the 2nd command, and Gemini told me the following:

# Deletes user-level display configurations
rm ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserver.*.plist

# Deletes the modern system-wide display configuration file (Requires admin password)
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.displays.plist

After doing those two, I just restarted my computer, set the custom display preset and restart my MBP again to check if the display preset got removed or not, but this actually fixed it. I even shutdown my MBP and turn it on and the custom preset is still there. So this fixed the problem.

If my deduction is correct, there is somewhere in the .plist file that is causing this bug, the fact that this problem persists beyond updates, means that the apple devs can't seem to find the problem, and the setting was something on the higher level, that the OS doesn't really touch on each update. By resetting the .plist files, we essentially remove all the bugged settings and force the OS to generate a new one, and thus by random chance fixes the bug.

TL;DR

• Run the 4 commands above
• Restart the mac
• Make a custom preset
• Restart the mac
• If the custom preset is still there, then shut down your mac
• If the custom preset is still there after you turn it on again, you fixed the bug

JRolAn-777 wrote:

If you customize an existing preset under Setting - Display - Preset - Customize Preset, and gave it a name there, this is saved as a user profile. In ColorSync you can see the profiles, and for a device, e.g. Display - Color LCD, you can see the factory profile and below that what profile is being currently applied. There one can select, under Other, the profile of the customized preset you have previously saved.

The annoying thing is that this is not possible under Settings- Display, because customized presets disappear continuously

That doesn’t happen on my MacBook Pro M2 (Tahoe 26.4.1)

My icc profile that I created with ccProfiler is there under ColorSync - Profiles > User. But no profiles there that have the same name as my custom made presets.

The device section shows as yours does though and as it should, with my icc profile selected as the current active profile.

I suspect if you do a full calibration on a custom preset with the native Apple display calibration then the profile that gets created from that may appear under profiles in ColorSync with the preset name. That’s just a guess on my part though as my colorimeter isn’t compatible with the Apple Display Calibration built in software.

have you also tried using ColorSync to change your current profile back to factory default? Then changing it back to your icc profile by selecting the saved profile file manually in ColorSync.

After realizing this issue appears across all systems since 26.3, I remeasured and set up custom profiles on two laptops. Both do the same thing. After a restart, the custom profiles are wiped and gone.

For now I'm just avoiding restarts until this gets fixed. I sent feedback directly to Apple to get their attention. If anyone else is annoyed by this, consider doing the same: https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos/

If you customize an existing preset under Setting - Display - Preset - Customize Preset, and gave it a name there, this is saved as a user profile. In ColorSync you can see the profiles, and for a device, e.g. Display - Color LCD, you can see the factory profile and below that what profile is being currently applied. There one can select, under Other, the profile of the customized preset you have previously saved.

The annoying thing is that this is not possible under Settings- Display, because customized presets disappear continuously

Cosimo6 wrote:

There is one major downside with the Custom Display Presets customization.

Over the years the screen brightness decreases but the profile is not aware of it.

For instance the "Photography (P3-D65)" profile provided by Apple should give us 120cc

When I measure it the screen outputs 110 or less...my M1 is 4 years old now, with thousands of hours of runtime.

So the profiles are "not aware" that the screen emits less light than when it was brand new.

They assume all is the same, display can't' measure itselfs.

So it is really much better to set brightness manually (don't change it after) then calibrate using Calbrite or other similar devices/software

Yes it takes more time (Calibrate full profile is 15 minutes) but it is better than Custom Display Presets that anyway require these external devices/sfotware to enter accurate customisation values.

I now went back to doing custom calibration every 15 days and is much more reliable than calibrating Custom Display Presets .

My 3 cents.

Yeah but that’s why you use your calibration device with its software to find the white point and luminance values first and then create a custom preset in Apple display settings and add those values in the fine tuning. Then with that custom preset active you can run and apply a full calibration again using your device software or through Apple calibration if you have a new compatible device to create icc profile. It’s still common practice to re calibrate every so often as the display ages.

Check for that profile in the Color Sync Utility.

Ben Guthrie wrote:

While I haven't looked into Beta 26.5, I can happily report that - for me at least - upgrading to macOS 26.3.2 and subsequently to 26.4 has fixed my problems with maintaining monitor calibration. I've saved my customised display preset in a location that is NOT inside Apple's default library location. Now, when I reboot all is well. My calibrated colour profile remains attached and my luminance fine tuning also remains intact. I've re-booted multiple times without any issue since the release of 26.3.2. I can always tell straight away that all's working properly after reboot cos the brightness f-keys don't do anything. And that's a good thing.

Not sure why others on this thread are still having problems. Note that I do NOT have an external monitor, just my built-in 16" MacBook Pro screen. Note also that - perhaps - my trick of saving my customised display preset in a location where Apple can't delete it might be the reason I'm no longer having problems.

I'm confused what you mean above by saving your custom preset elsewhere? when you create custom presets it doesn't give you the option of saving it anywhere. You can export it somewhere but that's just as a backup file not an in-use file. You can save ICC profiles wherever you like though. Maybe that's what you are referring to?

Yes, of course, I expected it to be worse, but despite what ColorSync says, the profile is obviously not active. I was using it to confirm that the profile was not active, even though ColorSync said it was. The profile contains a targeted white point as well, set to the same values, regardless of the hardware-fine-tuned adjustment in the preset. So if the profile was actually active, the delta E values shouldn't change, at least not drastically, since the target was the same in the hardware adjustment and the profile target.

I opened a case regarding this issue and spoke to a Senior Specialist yesterday. After 45 minutes, their suggestion was to boot in safe mode and redownload macOS, and if it is still happening, contact them again; they would forward it to the Engineering Department. I did that, and redid all this, and it was still happening.

Since then, I decided to give DisplayCAL a go and went through the same steps, then built a profile in DisplayCAL instead. As expected, upon restart, the custom preset and the fine-tuning are gone. As with the Calibrite Profiler profile, when the computer goes to sleep and is awoken again, the rainbow screen appears. So it seems I am dealing with two issues: this same preset reset everyone else is, AND my computer seems unwilling to accept a third-party profile altogether. When the computer sleeps and wakes back up, the display profile is misread or corrupted, causing the screen issue. I assume the preset issue is a bug since it involves Apple’s own software, but I wonder if my rainbow screen issue is a hardware issue. Since my setup is the newest here and I am the only one experiencing this second issue, I wonder if it is by design and if Apple is instead attempting to heavily push the use of their new proprietary calibration software by not allowing third-party profiles, or if there is simply a problem with this specific machine.

For now, I have decided just to take the ‘Art is Right’ approach: use Apple’s Pro Display Calibrator, skip installing a custom ICC profile altogether, and not restart the computer, so the custom preset and fine-tuning are not reset. I also plan to run a DisplayCAL verification for this native calibration and ensure it is suitable.

There is one major downside with the Custom Display Presets customization.

Over the years the screen brightness decreases but the profile is not aware of it.

For instance the "Photography (P3-D65)" profile provided by Apple should give us 120cc

When I measure it the screen outputs 110 or less...my M1 is 4 years old now, with thousands of hours of runtime.

So the profiles are "not aware" that the screen emits less light than when it was brand new.

They assume all is the same, display can't' measure itselfs.

So it is really much better to set brightness manually (don't change it after) then calibrate using Calbrite or other similar devices/software

Yes it takes more time (Calibrate full profile is 15 minutes) but it is better than Custom Display Presets that anyway require these external devices/sfotware to enter accurate customisation values.

I now went back to doing custom calibration every 15 days and is much more reliable than calibrating Custom Display Presets .

My 3 cents.

I can confirm, just tested. The profiles stay in tact, however the fine-tune information of the white point now gets wiped instead. As far as I can remember the fine-tuned white point information always remained on the MacBooks and the Pro XDR (but the custom profiles got deleted recently).

Now only the external display maintains both the custom profile and white point the MacBook Pros just keep the custom profile.

I guess we need to report once more – frustrating – I dunno what they are doing at Apple.

Yep just to add my grumble about this issue.

I noticed that my brightness keys were able to change my MacBook Pro Display which they shouldn’t. Found that my custom preset had disappeared. I created a new one, fine tuned and even did full calibration again only to find that when I restarted my MacBook Pro it had deleted the custom preset again !! My ICC profile remains current in ColorSync though. I can export my custom preset to import it each time as a workaround whilst this bug is hopefully being squashed however it doesn’t seem to save the fine tuning settings on export/import. Most annoying.