Colour display on different devices

…my macbook is also 10 years old. I've done colour calibration on it, but I still don't know if I should trust it. I had some high quality prints done, and I feel like they didn't really reflect what I was seeing on the screens of my devices, and I definitely didn't like how the edits look on the prints.

By @SarahBauer

Some of these things can be known…but “it’s complicated…”

If you have used calibration or profiling hardware on your MacBook Pro display, then that is what you can trust the most. However, it’s not so simple.

What you can trust is that the MacBook Pro is displaying, to the best of its ability, the target settings in the calibration/profiling software. For example, if the software was set for 120 cd/m² and D65, then that is what the display is calibrated to. But those settings are correct only if they’re consistent with how you are going to deliver your images. Those are good general settings for print, but different printing processes or viewing conditions might give you a better preview using other calibration settings. And that’s not even considering that the majority of images today do not get printed, so if all you do is make images for video and social media, 120 cd/m² and D65 might not actually be the right settings. In short, a display calibration is useful only when the target settings are consistent with the image’s final viewing conditions.

But it goes beyond that. A computer display can display many more colors than a printer, so a perfect display calbration can show lots of colors that can’t be printed. This can explain the situation where you calibrate your display using target settings for print, but the prints still look different. To better anticipate how an image will look in print, you can simulate print colors on screen using soft-proofing. This runs the image preview through a printer color profile that you select. In Lightroom Classic, you can set this up in the Develop module (on the View > Soft Proofing submenu).

So if you want a better simulation of print colors on screen, you should not only calibrate and profile the display, but also set up soft-proofing.

Now, about devices like your iPad: Currently, there is no standard way to calibrate or profile the displays on phones and tablets. The way it comes out of the factory is basically what you get. What you want to do is minimize the settings differences between the computer and the devices. The easiest one to control is brightness. Many people set their phone/tablet brightness higher than their computer brightness, and that makes them both look different and too bright to preview for print. I find that in general, an iPad set to half brightness is more or less comparable to the brightness of a computer display calibrated for print previewing.

But there are other things you want to do in the display settings of both a computer and a tablet/phone: Disable any of the automatic adjustments. This is because calibration requires keeping the equipment locked to the target settings, but many devices can automatically adjust brightness and color to respond to the ambient light, which takes them away from the calibrated state. For Macs and iPads/iPhones, you want to disable Automatic Brightness, True Tone (auto-adjust color balance), and Night Shift (reduce blue light at night).

If all of those things are done, it still might not be a perfect match between devices and prints, but you’ll be doing the best you can.

The only way to trust what you see on screen is to calibrate and profile your display with a sensor and dedicated software. If the application you are using supports icc profiles and color management (far from all do!), this monitor profile will be used to correct colors as they are sent to screen. And so the colors are accurately represented on screen.

So if you have a profiled display on your main computer, Lightroom Classic (which is fully color managed), can be trusted and is the reference.

Note that you need to set the framework for color management to work within, by defining a white point and a black point for your display. This is the part known as calibration. What we simply call "calibration software" will perform both in one process, calibration first, then profiling. The monitor profile is a description of the display in its calibrated state.

For most normal scenarios, a white point around 120 cd/m² and D65 is a good starting point. The aim is that monitor white should be a visual match to paper white. The black point is often left to native, but if you want a good screen to print match, you may need to lift the black point considerably.

Obviously there are lots of variables here, so no fixed numbers can be given. The basic principle is that the screen is calibrated to match the print. You can't do it the other way - paper white and max ink are what they are.