A Computer Darkroom Tutorial

One of the first things I noticed when I first took delivery of my Apple HD Cinema Display in early October 2002 was that it was overly bright and had a very obvious shift towards magenta in whites and light grey tones. Obviously this was going to have a serious effect on Photoshop and needed to be corrected.

Fortunately I had a range of hardware based display calibration systems available to me, which meant that I was able to very quickly neutralise the colour cast. However life is rarely this kind to everyone, so this tutorial will describe the Apple software only method of calibrating an LCD display.

Calibrating an LCD display in Mac OS X

The following screenshots show the process of calibrating an Apple LCD display using the Apple built-in Display Calibrator Assistant. Before beginning the process of calibrating your LCD display and to make it easier for yourself I recommend that you use a mid grey desktop background. You can change back to your favourite background image/colour when the calibration process is completed.

• From Mac OS X System Preferences panel open the Displays applet

• Ensure you display is set to the Native resolution (LCD's should always be set to the native resolution otherwise images will appear soft)

• Ensure Colors is set to Millions

• Set the Brightness slider to your preferred value (the Apple default is approximately  60%, although a slightly brighter level might be necessary on aging displays). With Apple PowerBooks it's actually better that you adjust the Brightness control to maximum.

 

May 2005

Note: the screenshots used in this tutorial are based on the version of Display Calibrator shipped with Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger).

 

 

• Choose the Color tab

• Search the list of Display Profiles for one that matches your display and select it. In truth this step shouldn't be required since the calibration utility automatically picks up the necessary data from the display via the DVI/ADC connector.

• Press the Calibrate button.

 

 

Note: if after calibrating your display you find that it appears to revert to the uncalibrated state then repeat the step outlined above but this time select the new calibration profile. Very often this problem arises after the computer wakes from sleep mode and is especially prevalent with Apple PowerBooks. It's actually a bug in the Operating System that for one reason or another Apple seems unable or unwilling to fix.

 

• Expert Mode should be selected so that all the available settings can be adjusted.