OS X keyboard shortcuts defaults may introduce trouble with monitor calibration and general display quality !! :-o
OS X keyboard shortcuts defaults may introduce trouble with monitor calibration and general display quality !! :-o
- Subject: OS X keyboard shortcuts defaults may introduce trouble with monitor calibration and general display quality !! :-o
- From: Peter Karp <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 10:32:45 +0200
Hi,
in the last weeks we had a hard time with a customer who told us that
the hardwarecalibrated display could not be calibrated successfully.
He experienced serious problems. When judging the calibration with a
gray ramp you could see serious banding issues. The customer told us
that he sees no differentiation in near white and near black regions.
We made a diagnosis via phone and checked his calibration (loaded his
calibration values he mailed to us on our monitor) and we could see
the banding problems, but the differentiation was o.k. for us. [1]
The customer tested two monitors on three Macs runinning Tiger or
Panther. All showed the same problems. We swapped the monitor and the
measuring device but the problems remained. We checked the settings of
the graphics card for millions of colors and so on. The problem could
not be located.
Finally we got the hint that the user might have increased the
contrast in
System Preferences
Universal Access - Seeing
Display - Enhance contrast
We did not think this was the problem, because it's unlikely that such
a setting would have been made on totally different macs (from
different people). _But_ after we informed the customer that this
might be the problem if he increased the contrast he denied and told
us that he never made a change to the "Universal Access" settings. We
asked him to doublecheck if the contrast might be increased there. He
checked and confirmed that the contrast was increased somewhat. After
resetting the contrast and recalibrating the monitor everything was
fine finally!
Our customer talked to several colleagues (photographers) and asked
them to check the contrast settings. And you guess it: many found the
contrast settings to be increased too!
0) Have you or your customers experiences similar problems before?
None of the users changed the contrast settings on purpose. All of
them changed the contrast by chance when they accidently used the
key-combination:
Keyboard Shortcuts
Universal Access
Increase contrast (Command+Alt+Control+.)
Decrease contrast (Command+Alt+Control+,)
I wonder if the keyboard shortcut (, or .) to change the brush size in
Photoshop 6 and 7 might be the reason that many people seem to
increase the contrast accidently. If you put a book on the keyboard it
also can happen that you accidently increase the contrast via the key
combo.
I thought some of you might be interested to hear from this problem.
In addition I have some questions:
1) How can I automate to reset the contrast settings?
2) Is it possible to automate disabling the default key combination
for changing the contrast?
3) Does someone know whom to contact at Apple to report this problem.
I think the default key combination should be changed, because I think
that far more people get trouble with this default then people who
benefit from this default?
4) Why does the tiny developer example app "Gammas" does _not_ reflect
the influence of the contrast setting (under "Universal Access")?
Because this contrast increase is not done in the hardware it must be
done by changes to the video card LUT. Gammas shows the change of the
video card LUT when the vcg-Tag in an ICC-profile is used, but doesn't
show how the video LUT is changed when increasing the contrast
setting under "Universal Access".
Is there a tool which shows _all_ active changes on the video card
LUT?
Looking forward your ideas and comments.
Best regards
Peter
[1] Now we understand that we had differentiation in the highlights
and shadows, because we did not increase the contrast setting here
_just_ had the bad calibration profile (The calibration info is stored
in a private tag in the ICC profile).
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