Native Colour Profile for OS X

Question

Level 1

14 points

Native Colour Profile for OS X

Does anyone know of a colour profile I can use in OS X lion that passes through the raw RGB values to the monitor like Windows does? None of the colour profiles that come with Lion, Adobe's suite or my monitor pass through the native RGB values of what's on-screen. For an example of what I mean by native colour profile, if I set the RGB colour value #45f4d3 in Photoshop or in CSS for a web page, I want the value #45f4d3 sent to my monitor, rather than some slight offset of that.

In other words, I want a colour profile that mimicks colour profiles being turned off completely (which I don't believe is possible under OS X; I will never understand why).

Thanks,

Tom

Macbook Pro 13" (Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.6.4), Dell U2410 LCD Monitor

Posted on Sep 6, 2011 1:52 AM

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Answer 1

Dave Hutch

Level 4

1,497 points

Sep 6, 2011 2:34 AM in response to Wardrop19

Doesn't this just mean that you haven't calibrated your monitor correctly?

The colour profile that came with your Dell monitor (or was found when the Mac connected to it if it's "Plug n Play") is the corect one to use.

If you see colour shifts, you might have to manually calibrate your monitor using the Colour settings in the Display Preferences.

Another thing to check is that all your monitor settings are "Neutral" i.e no dynamic contrast settings or white balances etc.

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Answer 2

Wardrop19 Author

Level 1

14 points

Sep 6, 2011 2:58 AM in response to Dave Hutch

It has absolutely nothing to do with whether my monitor is calibrated or not. I want the RGB values encoded in my non-colour managed images and in my website stylesheets to be sent to the monitor as they are, without being altered by a colour profile.

To see what I mean yourself, go to the following web page: http://html-color-codes.info/#insertcolor (you can use any website colour picker, as long as it displayed RGB values and is driven by CSS).

In the colour picker, choose a colour, then launch the "DigitalColor Meter" app that comes with OS X and set the drop-down to "Display native colors". Compare the RGB values reported by the colour picker on the website with those reported by the digital color meter. If they're different (which I'm betting they are) then that's the problem I'm trying to resolve.

My end goal is simply to make the colour of my Mac be the exact same as it is on Windows, which basically means I want my Mac to pass the raw/native colour values to my monitor. Seeing as though I can't simply turn colour profiles off, I need a dumb colour profile that emulates this.

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Answer 3

Wardrop19 Author

Level 1

14 points

Sep 6, 2011 3:19 AM in response to Wardrop19

I think what I'm after is a Generic sRGB color profile. The default OS X sRGB profile and Generic RGB come close, but they still produce undesireable color shifts.

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Answer 4

Wardrop19 Author

Level 1

14 points

Sep 6, 2011 3:38 AM in response to Wardrop19

Can someone upload their "Color LCD" ICC profile and give me a link to it as I think mine is screwy. It looks all yellow when I apply it, but it produces the correct color values. If I VNC in from my Windows PC, it matches perfectly (as for some reason it doesn't have the yellow tinge over VNC).

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Answer 5

Wardrop19 Author

Level 1

14 points

Sep 6, 2011 4:06 AM in response to Wardrop19

Ok, it seems that sRGB is indeed the color profile required to match Windows. The problem was that I had to restart the applications I was using to sample colour from between changing colour profiles. This thread can be ignored for now.

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