Calibrating your Mac’s display will ensure the digital values in images are translated to display properly on the display devices you use, and is an important step anyone doing image editing and graphic design. To help with this, OS X has a built-in display calibration tool which supports both basic and expert modes for calibrating your display. These options are nothing new for OS X; however, in El Capitan Apple has made the calibrator’s expert mode hidden by default.
The calibrator is a tool that is located in the System > Library > ColorSync > Calibrators directory, and which can be launched in the Finder or by going to the Displays system preferences and clicking the “Calibrate…” button. In older versions of the program, the option for Expert Mode was a checkbox on the calibrator’s main window, but now this is missing. However, if you hold the Option key when opening the Calibrator tool, the checkbox will show and be checked.
If you wish to calibrate your display, I do recommend you spend some quality time with the Calibrator tool in Expert mode. It is not the best option out there since the adjustment bars are rather small which make fine-tuning a little challenging, but with practice and a fair amount of squinting to ensure the images you are presented with during the calibration properly blend together, you can get a fairly decent result.
Optionally you can look into third-party calibration tools like SuperCal, including hardware calibration devices like the Spyder. These can be a bit expensive, but may be easier to use for quick and uniform calibrations, and may be worth it if your work is requires image management.
Hold the Option key when you launch the calibration program, and this option will now be available for a more in-depth display calibration routine.
Thanks for pointing out this ‘trick’. Just another function of the almost magical option key! ;+)
I find that if I make my monitor as bright as I like, I then end up with photographs that are too dark when printed. Most higher quality papers have “profiles” that can be used by most graphics editors to help render colors to match that particular paper. I’m sure the commercial hardware and software tools you mentioned would solve the immediate problem, but the financial one might be worse! LOL! For now, I simply print ‘test’ images and determine starting saturation and brightness values to use before making initial prints. Then go from there based on that initial printing. As you can surmise, I am a favorite customer of most paper suppliers!! I’m also, obviously not a professional! 8-P
Not a useful article. Cannot find System > Library > ColorSync > Calibrators directory, even with Spotlight.
You can navigate to the location in the Finder, or use the Displays system preferences to open the calibrator tool. The location is not included in Spotlight searches, so you will not be able to use Spotlight to open the Calibrator Assistant tool.
Spotlight doesn’t search most system level files – like this one. If you follow the path Topher provides, the Calibrators folder is there with the Display Calibrator.app inside, unless something or someone has been messing with your system. In any case, you can use the app via the Displays preference pane, again as Topher explains in the article.
That said, this app is very long in the tooth, little changed from the Mac OS days before OS X. If you do decide to use a third-party utility, be sure it is compatible with your Apple monitor if you’re using an iMac or Apple laptop before laying down your money.
Very useful article. I recalibrate my Macs fairly regularly and was stuck wen, after updating to El Capitan, the ‘Expert’ mode (which always used to be visible as default) had disappeared and I couldn’t recalibrate a 5K retina display. (Apple support didn’t seem to know about the option command either….) So – thank you very much.
Hi all— I just updated my iMac 21″ computer to El Capitan. I do allot of graphic designing and my images that are uploaded to my website are “blown-out” in the highlight areas and all the details are lost. I tried the calibration but it was to no avail. My husband believes that it has something to do with the graphics card. I was looking for the drivers, but could not find a single one. Apparently my mac uses the ATI Radeon HD 4670 (256 MB) Graphics card. Has anyone else experience the same problem? If so, what is the solution.
Hi all— I just updated my iMac 21″ computer to El Capitan (10.11.5). I do allot of graphic designing and my images that are uploaded to my website are now “blown-out” in the highlight areas and all the details are lost. I tried the calibration trick but it was to no avail. My husband believes that it has something to do with the graphics card. I was looking for the drivers, but could not any for this graphics card. My mac uses the ATI Radeon HD 4670 (256 MB) Graphics card. Has anyone else experience the same problem? If so, what is the solution?