What are people here doing to calibrate two Mac displays?

D.Fosse makes some very good points -

Calibration targets (luminance, white colour temperature) are, I find, quite personal and environment based.

Also that the limitations in calibrating [matching] 2 screens using a sensor device [like i1display] sometimes reveals a technical limitation - instrument / eye metamerism. i.e. the way the instrument "sees" colour and tone may not quite match the way a human eye sees it. 

That said, a calibrator and decent software will get those screens a lot closer than Apple's old manual calibration used to. 

Additionally, if you are using your main display for serious imaging work then you should really own a hardware calibrator - that applies even if you had just one screen. The difference you are seeing between the two is illustrating to you just how different screens can be - and its often not noticed when they are used in isolation.

I hope this helps

neil barstow, colourmanagement.net :: adobe forum volunteer

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The most important thing you do when calibrating a monitor is to set the white point and the black point. There is no automatic procedure for this, because it depends on your working environment and the ambient conditions.

The white you see on screen isn't "white". If it was, you'd need a welding mask. On screen white has a color, and it has a brightness. You pick the white point so that it matches a white surface under "normal" lighting conditions - like white paper. As it happens, most of us tend to agree that something around 6500K and 120 candelas per square meter (cd/m²) meets this requirement under most normal conditions. But of course nothing is ever perfectly normal, so adjustments are almost always necessary.

What this does, is set the environment for color management to operate in. Within this framework, white is white and black is black. And from this point on, a calibrator operates at very high precision to define the monitor's color space and ensure accurate display.

But 6500K is only one axis, the blue-yellow temperature scale based on black body radiation. There is also a magenta-green axis to consider. A monitor may well have a native white point that is off the Kelvin scale, in either the green or magenta direction. A more complete definition of white point is therefore the standard D-series illuminants. D65 is a more precise term than 6500K.

A monitor's native white point may be more or less off for a variety of reasons. Getting two monitors of different make and model to match perfectly may be difficult. You may need to set them to different values to get a visual match. This isn't because the calibration sensor is inaccurate, but because the eye and a sensor don't quite work the same way.

So what I'm getting at is that it's still a visual process and you need to trust your eyes on this. But once you have your white point and black point defined, a calibrator handles the rest reliably and accurately, much more precisely than you can do by eye.

You buy a calibrator...

This only demonstrates why you should never trust generic profiles and generic calibration tables. A calibrator that does actual measurement is always needed. Eizo even ship a dedicated calibrator with their high-end units.

Hi there,

The difference in the color output on the secondary display is quite offset. Have you tried using a third party color calibration tool?

Just a suggestion, have you to checked out any color calibration software for dual monitors? Example: https://www.xrite.com/en/service-support/calibrating_and_profiling_dual_monitors_on_mac_os_x_systems

This might help you in getting rid of the color cast. Also, checkout the standard recommendations for calibrating displays: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/working-with-color-profiles.html#Calibrateandprofileyourmonitor

Hope that helps!

Thanks,

Akash