Calibrate your Mac’s display
Check your colour settings for more accurate photo and video viewing.
Most modern Macs look great straight out of the box, thanks to the inclusion of Retina displays that meet P3 display standards for colour accuracy. However if you’re doing colour critical design work, photography, or video editing and need to make sure the colours you see onscreen are truly true to life, then there are some handy extra steps you can take – steps that are particularly important if you’re using a third-party external monitor that may have some display quirks of its own, or should you want what comes out of your printer to be a faithful facsimile of what you can see onscreen (and vice versa).
In macOS Catalina, you can easily check your display settings in System Preferences
> Display, where you’ll find various options running under the Display, Colour and Night Shift tabs running along the top of the window. Select the Colour tab and you’ll be able to check your current display profile, delete a profile or calibrate your display.
Clicking the Calibrate button opens the Apple Display Calibrator Assistant, which enables you to do things like set your display’s white point, gamma and so on… Or at least it would do if most of the options weren’t now hidden from view by default.
We’ll show you how to regain control of those options, and also how you can calibrate your monitor more accurately by using a colorimeter – a special kind of camera that measures the colour accuracy of your display. Here we’re using the SpyderX Pro ($299, from Datacolor, datacolor.com). ROB MEAD-GREEN