Profiling Mac laptop monitor

[kyle]

One of our customers came in for me to profile the monitor on his Mac laptop, which is a service we occasionally provide. I was not successful because it seemed like the profile was being applied twice, perhaps by two different processes.

When profiling on a Mac, I first assign a profile to the display that I intentionally adjusted to cause the blue and green colorants to be reduced significantly so the display will have a strong reddish color. By doing this, I can make sure the profiling software successfully tells the system to turn off color management when I see the display change to more normal colors.

After assigning the test profile in the displays category in system preferences, everything went red, but only while the system preferences application was active. When it closed, the colors went back to the factory default. After rebooting the computer, everything was reddish. I've never had to reboot to make a profile stick before.

When I started the profiling software (Optical from Pantone Colorvision), the colors became somewhat more normal, but still had a red cast to them. I did not proceed to profile because without color management turned off, the profile would be useless.

I then looked at the display color while changing between different standard profiles in system preferences, and the color changed on the monitor as I chose different profiles, but always still had a reddish cast, which indicates that a profile is being applied twice, and that only one of the two is changing when I switch profiles in system preferences. I suspect that the other profile changes after reboot, resulting in the same profile being applied redundantly.

The customer said he didn't do anything unusual and didn't install any software other than CS3. His OS is 10.5 (I can't remember the sub-version). I cannot repeat the problem on another system (no laptops, though). I profiled his last laptop, which was OS 10.4, and it seemed to work great, although I wasn't using the "red" profile for verification then, so it's possible that profile was being applied on top of itself also, and he was still happy with the result.

Also, does anyone know of a way to calibrate laptop monitors (i.e., adjust RGB curves)? They always seem to be more limited than stand-alone monitors.

 

[Ritter]

Things to consider: In System Preferences the profile can be set and within each of the Creative Suite programs a profile can be set. If you are having issues with System Preferences staying applied and this dual effect you are talking about I would suggest starting in Safe Mode then restarting as this will clear the caches across the entire operating system (upon the startup chime hold down the right shift key until you see the spinning circle).

I'l warn you that the LCDs on Apple laptops are not reliable for color even when calibrated. The matte can be tweaked a bit but the gloss is completely a lost cause. I own a MacBook Pro 17" (Generation 1) and fought this battle and lost. The LCDs have been improved somewhat in the subsequent versions but not to the point of being anywhere close to a reasonable gamut. You will either end up very warm (red) or very cold (blue) there seems to be no neutral point. If color is a critical element for him I strongly recommend buying a high quality external monitor and plugging in when working with things critical to color.

 

[kyle]

I do remember checking the process list, and I'm certain there were no Adobe processes running. I think Adobe's color management is strictly passive, i.e., it doesn't modify the display profile, but merely asks the operating system for it, or assumes a generic RGB profile for the monitor and expects the OS to do the conversion.

I asked the customer to connect an external monitor and repeat the same procedures to see if the behavior is different, but haven't heard anything, and don't expect to since it's been over three weeks. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to extensively test the system because I didn't want to keep him too long for what appeared to be a lost cause. I'm hoping to find a definitive reason why color management was being applied twice so I don't get caught in this situation in the future. It's not too big of a deal to my customer, which doesn't help me solve the problem, because he probably won't want to spend any time investigating.

I found a 10.4 laptop we had sitting in a drawer and could not repeat the problem. I think some of our sales people have 10.5 laptops, so I'm going to try to bug one of them.