Calibrating MacBook Pro Retina for color grading
- Thread starter alohype
- Start date
Andrius Simutis
Veteran
Have you tried any of the monitor calibrators? Like Xrite or Spyder? That'd at least get you accurate colors to start with. Any "monitor profile" will be dependent on your specific monitor's biases.
Bruce Watson
Veteran
First, what are you color grading for? DVD? Blu-ray? Cinema? Broadcast? YouTube? What?
Second, no monitor is going to be accurate if it isn't calibrated. Uncalibrated, it won't matter which profile you use.
You are absolutely right. I'm grading for youtube, it's the worst scenario: I do not have access to any external calibration device. I have to be at least close enough, to not work with some colours that somewhere else will have drastic differences.
morgan_moore
Major Contributor
Its youtube. Dont calibrate your monitor the viewers dont have calibrated monitors.. grade away.. look at it on your monitor, your phone , your mums (2002PC) monitor and your missus ipad. Make a look that looks OK across these devices.
S
S
So extremely simple solution, yet I've never though about it before. To just check it on different devices if currently not having access to calibrated screen
Haha, thank you Sam! 
Bruce Watson
Veteran
I disagree. The point of calibrating a monitor is to give it a solid linear gray axis, with linear gradations out to the limits of the gamut. You do this because if your image is "centered in the working space", it will look reasonably good on the majority of monitors that aren't calibrated. IOW, it lets you maximize the number of viewer monitors that look good showing your image.
For example, say your uncalibrated monitor is a little too magenta. So you correct your image with a little extra green to compensate. Now it looks good on your uncalibrated monitor.
If half the monitors out there are already too green (a reasonable assumption), you've made your image way green on them. Their extra green plus your extra green will mean that some of those monitors will be so green it will be hard to look at.
But you've also made your image too green on any monitor that isn't at least as magenta as yours is. So all of the green monitors, and some of the magenta monitors, are showing your image too green.
You can see where this is going, yes? The best you can do is put your image in the 10 ring at the center of the target working space. This maximizes the number of non-calibrated user monitors on which your image will be seen as reasonably acceptable. If most of the monitors out there are inside the 7 ring, perhaps they'll all give you a reasonable look, whether they are too green or too magenta either one. The outliers are sort of a lost cause, and people willing to use them probably don't care much about color fidelity anyway.
greenheron
Well-known member
This isn't print, its going to youtube. Jeez!
You want to set your monitor color space to SRGB in your GPU settings. SRGB is the standard display color space for web video viewed on computers and mobile devices. That will get you as close to WYSIWIG as you can get and minimize the possibility of gamma shifts in your grading output when viewed on other systems. At least some of the well known gamma shift problems with Macs is due to people grading to the default Gamma 1.8 apple display mode rather than gamma 2.2 SRGB standard or 2.4 REC709 standard. Both are available options in your display settings.
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