Ruben Vasquez wrote:
If you're retouching on the road, I'm willing to bet the problem is your brightness levels are too low and/or you may have an issue with glare. You want your screen to be brighter than the ambient light around you which isn't always easy to do if you're retouching in broad daylight, by a window or in a brightly lit room.

Take a look at your screen in a darkly lit interior and see if the problem still persists. If so, try increasing the brightness of your screen until the upper row is just visible.

Done all that. I usually work at night, in a completely dark room. I travel a lot, but I really prefer to work at night, even when I'm traveling. It doesn't make a difference I'm afraid. They are the same computers, when I put them next to each other in a dark room, one screen calibrated, one set back to factory settings, I can't see anything on the calibrated one. The other one gives perfect detail.

Laura Abigail wrote:

Done all that. I usually work at night, in a completely dark room. I travel a lot, but I really prefer to work at night, even when I'm traveling. It doesn't make a difference I'm afraid. They are the same computers, when I put them next to each other in a dark room, one screen calibrated, one set back to factory settings, I can't see anything on the calibrated one. The other one gives perfect detail.

Are you having the same problem at a higher luminance setting as well?

Ruben Vasquez wrote:

Are you having the same problem at a higher luminance setting as well?

Yes, tried setting it to 160, didn't make a difference. I've also just tried setting it to 250 to test your theory. (although they've told me most screens are way too bright, so I shouldn't go too bright) ...Still no change.

FLEXmanta wrote:
So, don't calibrate, profile.

I guess that is the other solution. Curious to see the results.

FLEXmanta wrote:
With a laptop, given the results you are already having, I would not even try calibrating and i would only let the program profile the monitor in order to have an ICC that color managed programs can work with.

We call calibration to the combination of 2 things: Calibration and profiling.

Calibration is the fiddling with the "signal" that is sent to your monitor to accomodate the color profiles you're gonna be working with. That is, if you decide to use ECI_RGB_v2 as your main working space, then you'd calibrate to 120cd/m, L* for the tone response curve and 5000K for the temperature.

Afer calibration is done, then the colorimeter's program will proceed to PROFILE the device and produce an ICC file that color management needs, in order to know what RGB values to send to the monitor so that you see the colors that look as close as possible to what the RGB values in a document at a specific color profile mean. That means, maybe, in order for your monitor to show AdobeRGB full red (255,0,0), it will also have to show a little blue and a little green. Who knows, that's part of what color management it. It's done automatically.

So what happens with most laptop monitors? They have these native values (temperature, tone response curve and luminosity), and they don't like being asked to be forced out of those natives through calibration. What you're left with is the possibility to leave all those values native, that is, not calibrating, and then profiling the monitor.

This all means that, without calibration, the set state of the display will not "help" color management, but you've seen how bad a job it'd do, and then profiling will create the ICC file that will tell photoshop and all those color managed applications how your monitor is and how it needs to be dealt with.

So, don't calibrate, profile.

18 year old me decided to put her macbook pro on "Adobe RGB (1998)" 4 years ago, because it looked close to any other computer I had ever seen. The standard Color LCD profile has got the same problem as my calibrated profiles. Too dark. So just leaving it on Adobe RGB is fine then?

How do I profile without calibrating? That profile is obviously way too blue. When I set everything to native in my calibrating program it will still produce a too dark screen and I don't really see an option to skip the calibrating.

Laura Abigail wrote:

18 year old me decided to put her macbook pro on "Adobe RGB (1998)" 4 years ago, because it looked close to any other computer I had ever seen. The standard Color LCD profile has got the same problem as my calibrated profiles. Too dark. So just leaving it on Adobe RGB is fine then?

How do I profile without calibrating? That profile is obviously way too blue. When I set everything to native in my calibrating program it will still produce a too dark screen and I don't really see an option to skip the calibrating.

Oh... in that case I wouldn't know how to help. The programs I'm familiar with offer the option to not calibrate and only profile (Basiccolor5).

FLEXmanta wrote:

Oh... in that case I wouldn't know how to help. The programs I'm familiar with offer the option to not calibrate and only profile (Basiccolor5).

It won't let me skip that step, so instead of letting it take the natives of the LCD profile, which is wrong, I should find a way to let it take everything from the Adobe RGB profile and then profile... Does this happen to normal people or is it just me again? -_-

Laura Abigail wrote:
Okay, that clearly isn't working.
The natives are probably the ones from the "color LCD" profile.
But that profile is completely off on both my computers.

Adobe RGB is spot on when it comes to contrast & details...
Checked it in photoshop, all the others are showing 100% black, even though photoshop is telling me that there's detail.... The moment I switch to Adobe RGB I can see the detail again. Am I right in thinking that it does indeed mean that the others are off when it comes to contrast etc because the information is in the file and not related to what profile I'm using on my screen?

So theoretically I need everything from the Adobe RGB profile but with the right colours because that profile is way too blue.

... Does that make sense?

Does anyone know how I can get something like that?

I will never again say that Macbooks are easy to set up
I do find it a bit weird though that I appear to be the only one with this problem, on two computers from two different years, with two different screens...

All the other what? Other programs? But Photoshop is displaying fine?

The only other option I can think of that may help is to change your gamma setting to 1.8. That's a little unorthodox these days but if I remember right, that used to be the native gamma of the Macintosh operating system until recently.

As an aside note, if your work is getting published, it would be better to calibrate your screens to 5000k (D50), instead of 6500k (D65) as it makes color management easier for publication to offset press. Just a suggestion.

Ruben Vasquez wrote:

All the other what? Other programs? But Photoshop is displaying fine?

The only other option I can think of that may help is to change your gamma setting to 1.8. That's a little unorthodox these days but if I remember right, that used to be the native gamma of the Macintosh operating system until recently.

As an aside note, if your work is getting published, it would be better to calibrate your screens to 5000k (D50), instead of 6500k (D65) as it makes color management easier for publication to offset press. Just a suggestion.

The other pre-installed & calibrated profiles on my macbooks.
No, Photoshop isn't displaying fine either. It's a bit better than some other programs though, but still a lot too dark. I was comparing the histograms of my pictures to what I could see on the screen in different colour profiles. Only Adobe RGB (1998) shows the images correctly for some reason.

I've tried calibrating to 1.8 on my new macbook, didn't make any difference. I literally tried everything I could think of before posting here. Didn't try it on the old one though.

Thanks for the tip, will calibrate my Eizo to D50

Sean Baker Photo wrote:
Have you tried using DispCalGui?  It's much slower, but I find the results to be far better, and it does allow you to use native brightness + color temp (both of which would be recommended for a laptop screen).

Haven't tried that one yet. Will give it a go tonight, thanks

Pictus wrote:
DispcalGUI RuleZ!
But it wont calibrate the Eizo programmable hardware internal LUT(if the model have this feature) I made a tutorial at https://www.modelmayhem.com/po.php?thre … st17806610
As she is getting some type of black crush, in DispcalGUI config better use the
"Profile Type" to "curves + matrix" and enable the "Black point compensation"

My Eizo is looking great after calibration with its own software (ColorNavigator6 & i1 Display Pro) so I'm not going to calibrate that one with any other software. Made a few profiles for it last night, no problems at all with that one. It's just my macbooks.
Will take a look at it all tonight, thanks!

Faze1 photography wrote:
I had the same exact problem!!! I had to go back to the Mac store to fix it. They said something about the mac getting stuck on one color profile. Sorry, I'm not a tech-head. When I got to the Mac store, it took them 30 mins to figure out what the problem. They pulled their hard drive and add color profiles and made sure to save them in the right place.

It does get stuck sometimes. When I change the profile a few times in a row it sometimes adjusts the colours and keeps the contrast of the previous profile. Resetting the PRAM usually fixes it. Just seems weird to me that both my computers have it... One is four years old, the other one is two weeks old... Even though they're the same kind of computer, they can't be 100% the same. Apple must have changed things and made improvements over the past four years. They've also got a different screen... After calibrating they look exactly the same. (Which kind of is the point of calibrating, but they've both got the same problem. Which makes me think that maybe I'm doing something wrong)

I suppose I could take them to the store, but as my computers look identical they'll probably just tell me that they are clearly supposed to look that way or something like that.

Pictus wrote:
DispcalGUI RuleZ!
But it wont calibrate the Eizo programmable hardware internal LUT(if the model have this feature) I made a tutorial at https://www.modelmayhem.com/po.php?thre … st17806610
As she is getting some type of black crush, in DispcalGUI config better use the
"Profile Type" to "curves + matrix" and enable the "Black point compensation"

Right, but it's the MacBook screen which is the problem, right?  If not, then please simply ignore my decaffeinated self .

Sean Baker Photo wrote:

Right, but it's the MacBook screen which is the problem, right?  If not, then please simply ignore my decaffeinated self .

Yeah, both of my macbook screens have the problem.

When I work on my Eizo with my macbooks attached to it I don't have any problems. I just have to get my macbook screens right as well because I travel a lot and having a macbook is pretty useless if you have to attach it to a big screen in order to be able to see your pictures the right way. (It doesn't have to be 100% but I'd like it to be close so that I at least have an idea of what they'll look like)

Laura Abigail wrote:

Faze1 photography wrote:
I suppose I could take them to the store, but as my computers look identical they'll probably just tell me that they are clearly supposed to look that way or something like that.

Lucky for me the guys at the apple store was photographers and knew what to do already.