First: If the “wall of text” below is too intimidating, here’s the short version of how most people should use the Liquid Retina XDR display:
- Don’t pick up your color measuring device.
- In the Displays system preference, choose the Reference Mode that most closely represents your production standard. For example, many in this forum might choose Photography (P3-D65).
- Close System Preferences and enjoy your photography.
If none of the Reference Modes is close enough,
customize it: Select the closest one, choose Customize Presets, name your new preset, and adjust the settings. For example, I wanted my photography preset to be D65 at a luminance of 110 nits (cdm2) SDR for print, so I set that up.
Apple considers the Liquid Retina XDR display to be precisely calibrated at the factory. They have designed the settings around the premise that you should not have to recalibrate. Whether or not that’s true, they do allow you to fine-tune that calibration (this is mostly for shops with highly specific production standards), but they recommend doing it with
very precise and expensive measuring devices most people don’t have. Why? Because Apple thinks their factory calibration is so good that you can’t beat it with a sub-$500 measuring device.
Art’s video shows how you can do calibration fine tuning if you have a measuring device with software that has the right features. But if you do this, you are making an assumption that your device is at least as precise as those Apple recommends in their
calibration fine-tuning instructions. Because if your device is not as precise, then you risk entering measurements that are not precise enough to improve on the factory calibration.
In the video he uses a “Calibrite” device. I have a ”Datacolor spyderxPro.” Do you know if that will work?
Calibrite is a new brand name that X-Rite came up with for their color products. Over the years, X-Rite has bought up many of the color management brands like GretagMacBeth (makers of the ColorChecker target).
Datacolor is another traditional maker of color management devices, and one of their products should work just as well. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with the Datacolor Spyder, but the video makes it clear what it will need if it’s going to work for this purpose: The software you use to run the Spyder must have a feature that displays a target and reports the values read off the screen by the measuring device. You can then manually enter those values the way Art did.
That is an advanced-user kind of thing, different than how these devices are typically used to
profile the display, which is: Use their software to 1) display a known color target on the screen, 2) measure it, then 3) use those measurements to generate and install an ICC profile describing how far off the screen is. macOS then uses the ICC profile to correct the display by that much, kind of like putting on eyeglasses tuned for a specific person’s eye defects. This is usually an automated thing; you click once, stand back, and wait for it to finish.
The Apple Liquid Retina XDR Display allows more direct manipulation than that, similar to how a high-end desktop display works: It doesn’t need to generate and go through a corrective ICC profile (put on eyeglasses), because the display hardware itself can be
calibrated (laser surgery on the eye itself). That’s why Art does not go down the more common road of generating a profile.
At about 21:30 in the video, Art uses the color measurement device’s software to report what values the display is producing for a given white target. He then enters those numbers into the Fine Tune Calibration dialog box he opened at 17:05, and that updates the Reference Mode calibration. This direct adjustment is something that has not been possible on any Apple display before, except the $6000 Apple Pro Display XDR. (This calibration procedure is more automated on traditional high-end displays such as the NEC SpectraView or Eizo ColorEdge.)
All of this can be very confusing because you must first understand how the Reference Modes work before you can properly fine-tune the calibration. For example, if you leave your preset on one of the first two settings (Apple XDR Display (P3-1600 nits)) or Apple Display (P3-500 nits)), you can’t choose Fine-Tune Calibration. You have to create your own first, based on your production standard. And you probably want to, because for photography and print, for now it’s probably better to use a Reference Mode based on SDR; that is how Apple has set up its photography Reference Modes. (The default Reference Mode is HDR.) Also, some reference modes don’t allow adjusting brightness, because a specific luminance level is part of that reference mode so it must stay locked to that value (I set up my photography Reference Mode that way). Adjusting the display is a lot easier after understanding why all those things work the way they do.
Again, if this is too confusing, it’s because Apple does not expect most users to do all of that. Apple tried to produce a display where you
don’t have to measure and correct it, you just enter the values that define your production standard and start having fun making photos.
So for most users (other than color experts), the best thing to do is don’t rush into recalibrating a display that was recently calibrated precisely at the factory. Instead, choose or carefully create your Reference Mode, use it for a while, make some prints, and if necessary and if technically justified, decide whether you want to adjust the Reference Mode or fine-tune the calibration.
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