JJ4Short

Anyone know the "realest" color settings for the screen on a 15 inch pro?

Dan Martin

Buy a calibrator and find out!

Even if you just get a $70 pantone huey, it will make a huge improvement to your color workflow.

astro

buy a Huey! or a Pro if you have multiple monitors...

wndrlst

Calibrator is my next purchase. Damn photo habit.

jupitersolo

^^^ Just read under my screen name.

I was thinking the same thing about the monitors, a Huey or Spyder2??

wndrlst

The effing Spyder2.

Billiam

Alright, time for me to fess up and ask my idiot question. Where are the display adjustments on the Macbook Pro? The only thing I see is the brightness controls with the keyboard (fn+F1/F2). Where are the controls for adjusting contrast and the RGB color balance?

Good Ride

Hey -- maybe I can return a favor: Go to System Preferences, then Display. Pretty sure it's there (I'm on my PC right now, so can't check). Hope that helps.

wndrlst

If you go into the display calibrator assistant, you can select your target gamma, and do some other very basic calibration. I don't know of any quick keys, though, such as the ones that adjust brightness.

JJ4Short

I knew you guys would say calibrator

Billiam

The Displays system preference just has a facility to load profiles. No actual adjustments. And from what I can tell with a quick glance, the calibrator assistant looks to be the equivalent of what I've seen with the Adobe Gamma program on the Windows side of things. That being a software based "best guess". I could be wrong though.

I'm looking for the equivalent of the various adjustments you find when you bring up the built-in settings menu on a stand-alone monitor. From what I've read, you need to have control over brightness, contrast, and the individual RGB output levels in order to "properly" calibrate and profile a monitor. This has held consistent with the software that was included with both my Monaco Optix XR colorimeter as well as my Eizo monitor.

Billiam

I just wanted to elaborate a bit further in relation to what I posted above. A colorimeter is still a worthy investment even if it turns out the Macbook Pros don't have a means of adjusting the contrast and RGB outputs. A colorimeter and its software should still be able to do a comparison between commanded color output and actual measured colors the monitor shows and then use this information to create a custom color profile for you. Doing this is bound to give you results that are definitely better compared to doing nothing.

What you get when you have control over the display's RGB output levels is the ability to use the colorimeter and its software to fine tune the display's color temperature to the arbitrary value you pick (5000K, 6500K, etc...). Once this is done, you can then use the display's brightness and contrast adjustments to fine tune the white and black points with the colorimeter and its software.

This is the reason you'll almost always see me saying "calibrate and profile" instead of just calibrate. I personally think of tuning the color temperature and white/black points as calibrating and doing the color comparison portion as profiling.

JJ4Short

Yeah I am going to end up getting the color calibrator.