Calibrate your display’s colour

Make sure your screen is accurate by creating a ColorSync profile each month

Are you sure your Mac’s screen is working properly? If you do anything with colour, even making basic image adjustments in the Photos app, you need to know you’re seeing things as they really are. Even if your screen was set up perfectly in the past, its performance will drift over time and end up misleading you. ColorSync profiles help your Mac know about any deficiencies of your screen so it can adjust what’s sent to the display to compensate. This doesn’t alter your images, just the data that goes to your screen, giving you more predictable, trustable results when you print or share images, video and other files.

Calibrating your screen and creating a ColorSync profile is quick and easy, but it’s something we all forget to do. We’ll show you how to do this to a basic level using OS X’s built-in Display Calibrator Assistant, and how to use DataColor’s Spyder5 calibration tool to produce a more precise, reliable profile. The end result shouldn’t be dramatic (well, not unless your screen was disastrously bad to begin with), but the peace of mind this brings is tremendous. Keith Martin