Calibrating a 17-inch Apple MacBook Pro Display – Impressive
As long as the display looks nice, and in my case, my 17-inch MacBook Pro looks very nice, I haven't spent a lot of time worrying about the correct rendition of colors on the screen. You know, is it calibrated for the correct Pantone colors, etc. Well, yesterday evening an old friend twittered that he'd calibrated his display, and it was an amazing difference. Having never done this, I got to thinking: Was I missing something important? So I decided to look into it.
In the System Preferences, Display pane, 'Colors' tab, there's a button to calibrate the screen by a simple process that almost anyone can do. You start by clicking on the 'Calibrate' button:
from there, you'll see a new window pop up - you need to make sure that you have selected the "Expert Mode" and then click 'Continue'.
What you'll see is a series of Apple logos within a field of horizontal lines. The goal of each screen is to make the logo "disappear" by matching first it's intensity and then it's shade. After five of these screens, the assistant has all the details it needs to correctly set up the display for the best representations possible.
What I found was that the first time I did this I was a little off. The second time was a lot better. I'm guessing if I did this a few more times I'd be pretty darn good at it. It's a question of know how to move the cursor in the boxes to make the logo disappear. Clever idea, really.
So now I have my laptop's display calibrated, and I have to say, it's different. A little closer to reality, I think. The original "Color LCD" was a little brown (dirty) in comparison to what I have now. Not exactly night and day, but nice.