# Screen Calibration for MacBook Pro



## GabrielWolff (Dec 11, 2012)

Hoi everyone

Not entirely sure if this is the right section of the forums.

I have been editing and uploading photos for years, before recently noticing that there's this tiny little issue with photos looking completely different on each computer/screen. Most of the time my editing, looking great on my own MacBook Pro screen, looks like sloppy and unfinished work on others.

Trying to understand what I should do before completely freaking out, I started reading guides on calibration. 

After supposedly understanding how it should be done, now my screen's colors look like it has been to a 90*C washing machine, I can't really find a good contrast in Lr4, my photos still look pretty differently on others' screens.

How do you people, who publish mainly on the web, deal with this issue? Altogether, I mean, not just through calibration, but in general?

Thanks for your help...


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## clee01l (Dec 11, 2012)

Gabriel welcome to the forum. LR is a ColorSpace/Color profile aware application.  The monitor must be tuned so that the number that represents true "red" displays what appears to you as "red".  And similarly, this is use for all of the other colors in the color space. That is step 1. More importantly, the application that reads the number that represents true red, needs to send the number to the monitor that represents true red, so that it will display a color that appears to you what you perceive as true red. 
Lr is said to be color managed. Other applications like your browser may not be.  This is especially true of Windows image viewing applications. Most OSX image viewing applications and Safari are color aware. Chrome (the browser that I use on OSX), is not color managed. 

So, for your LR processed images to look as good as they do in your LR, you need to have your monitor tuned. Everyone else that views your images needs to have a monitor that is tuned to show true colors and not shifted colors. Also anyone viewing your images outside of LR (and this includes you), needs to use a color managed application to view the image.

there are several color calibration tools available to accurately tune your monitor and actively manage color as room conditions change with the champ going light. I use one called i1Display. It works well for me and will actively manage multiple monitors. 
If you do not have a piece of hardware to calibrate your monitor, you can use a display app in system preferences to adjust the color profile of your monitor to a generic perception of how you see color. 

Now, while you can control color in your computer environment, you have no control over what color looks like on my monitor or any friends monitor. So, all you can do is set a generic universal color profile in the image file and hope that your viewers will use a color aware application that will read the color profile and use it to attempt to display colors in the hues that you intended. When you export an image file, set the color profile to sRGB on the export dialog. This will assure that you give your users the best color space possible to represent your intended image colors..


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## Jim Wilde (Dec 11, 2012)

Cletus, Chrome on the Windows platform is now, finally, colour-managed. I had thought that it was always colour-managed on the Mac platform....


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## clee01l (Dec 11, 2012)

TNG said:


> Cletus, Chrome on the Windows platform is now, finally, colour-managed. I had thought that it was always colour-managed on the Mac platform....


After reading your post I did some research. It appears that sometime in January2012, a version release of Chrome started supporting color management in Chrome 16 beta.   This is different from the color management offered in windows in that there are no no settings to tweak. Now running v23, but still an incomplete color management spec as there is only support for icc v2.0 and not icc v4.0.


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## BenjaminJ (Dec 12, 2012)

So with my macbook pro I should use the sRGP color profile? Or just the color lcd profile?


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## LouieSherwin (Dec 12, 2012)

Benjamin,

On you MacBook Pro you will want to use the profile that is for the hardware, that is probably the "lcd" one that you are referring to. This is the one that describes the specific color characteristics of the lcd screen on you computer. 

While all MacBook Pro screens of specific model are similar there are going to be subtle differences between each individual screen. The more you care or are sensitive to color differences the more important it is to have an accurate profile of your monitor. These characteristics also change over time as the screen components age. This is why it is recommended to create a new screen profile on a regular basis. 

sRGB and Adobe RGB are a different kinds of profiles. They are designed to describe a standardized range of color and tone, called the gamut of an image. When your computer or  application like Lightroom gets ready to display an image with a sRGB profile for example the color management system will translate the sRBG color values into slightly different RGB values using your monitor profile before it is actually displayed. The net effect is that an image with an sRGB profile will look the same on different monitors. 

Using an image profile like sRGB on you computer would potentially create problems as you edit pictures in Lightroom. You might be able to get your images too look ok on your monitor as you edit them but they would look very strange as you sent them out to be viewed on the web or to be printed. 

I hope that helps. 

For more information a great resource to learn about color management is the Chromix ColorWiki. 

-louie


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## BenjaminJ (Dec 12, 2012)

Thank you LouleSherwin!


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