7 Ways To Adjust the Colors On Your Mac's Screen

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at 7 different ways that you could adjust the color on your Mac's display.

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Now you can make adjustments to your Mac's display to display things a little different. If the colors look a little off to you or you would rather it be brighter or darker or a little warmer or cooler. All these ways I'm going to show you can be done on your Mac without installing any extra software. Everything we're going to do is going to be in System Preferences. 

Let's go in there and the obvious place to start is to go to Displays. Now in Displays there's a color tab here. So let's go to that. This will allow you to set the Display profile. Now you're going to see a bunch of different things here. What you see is going to be different than what I see. You get these profiles when you install software, when you attach different types of screens to your Mac and you kind of buildup a list of them over time. You can try some of these to see how it changes the colors on your screen. You should see sometimes a slight adjustment and sometimes pretty major ones. 

You can also go and create your own profile. You can do this by hitting Calibrate here and it will walk you through all these different steps to calibrate your screen. When you're done you can name this and save it. It will appear here in the list.

Now there's no right or wrong way to go and use the Display Profile or to calibrate. It all depends on how you see things, the type of screen you've got. Obviously if you've got a MacPro or a MacMini you've got an external display. It can be made by many different companies. It can display colors in different ways. For me it really doesn't matter too much. But for a lot of people that are into design they care a lot about their display profile.

Now there's also Night Shift here. Night Shift is a way to actually reduce a blue light coming out of your screen. You can test it out by using this slider here. So I can adjust it and I can see something close to what it looks like normally on the left but it's definitely going to look a lot redder and warmer to the right. Then if I wanted to turn it on permanently I would need to set a Custom Schedule and have it always on. Otherwise I could set it to only be on at night or I could have it manually turned on right now and it will be on for the time being until tomorrow morning.

Now another way to adjust colors isn't to actually make screen adjustments but to use Dark Mode. If I turn on Dark Mode it's going to change the user interface on a lot of apps. All of the Apple apps will go dark with light text. Third party apps, some of them support Dark Mode and some of them don't. The same thing with webpages. Some of them will support Dark Mode and some of them won't. But it definitely does change the colors of your Mac in a very specific way. You could also set to Auto so that during the day it's in Light Mode and at night it will change to Dark Mode.

Now another way to change the colors on your Mac is to change the Accent and Highlight colors. So if I were to change the accent color say to purple you could see it reflected here in System Preferences. You can see how the outline here is now in purple. In other apps you have to look really carefully. Sometimes apps barely show any difference. For instance here in the Notes app you can see now that I have it set to purple I've got this highlight here that's purple. If I were to select something here you could see that highlight is purple. I can change the highlight color independent of the accent color. So if I want the highlight color to say be orange but keep the accent color purple I can. Now you can see this orange highlight here and even this highlight is in orange. Also you can see the highlight of Menu items stays purple. So accent color here and highlight color here.

Now for other color changes we'll have to go into Accessibility. In there we can click on Display and under Display we see several different ways to change colors. One is we can increase Contrast. This increases the contrast of the whole display. So you can see here the text is very dark now as opposed to kind of light gray. The same for the borders and outlines and stuff. You can see here how that really does change how Notes looks. Turn it off and we can see it like that. 

We can also reduce Transparency. Watch the Menu Bar here at the top. You can see how that becomes completely opaque now instead of a little transparent showing the color from the background. You can also adjust Display contrast here. Changing the contrast almost to the point where it's impossible to use from normal. So that's another way to play with the colors. A really extreme way would be to use Invert Colors. So invert colors inverts the entire screen. This is really meant for people with a visual disability where it's actually easier to read text and see other things with the entire screen inverted.

Now a way to directly change the colors on your screen is Color Filters right here. Now if you enable Color Filters then the filter type here will apply to your whole screen. In gray scale all the color is gone. I could also change it to some of these other things like for instance a red green filter. Now I could go to color tint. I could select the color and the entire screen is going to be tinted that color. I can set the intensity for that tint.

Now what you're going to get really depends on your screen. For instance on my third party LG screen attached to my MacPro color tinting doesn't seem to do much of anything. But on my MacBook Pro, of course,  using Apple's built-in display there's quite a difference.

Now we also shouldn't overlook changing the Desktop background because a lot of times what you're looking at the color that you're taking in with your eye are really all about what the background is. That's the majority of what you're seeing all the time. The background is always there. Going into Desktop and ScreenSaver and changing the Desktop picture really could change the whole look of your Mac. But also remember that things like the Menu Bar are semi-transparent. So Desktop background is going to change the color there. 

For instance let's choose a solid color as a Desktop background. If I go to cyan you could see here that this menu bar definitely is tinted cyan. Orange is definitely going to tint it orange. You could see here with a half tone background it's definitely a different color than with the Catalina one. This may seem obvious to some people but not to others. A lot of times I get people telling me, oh they don't like the color of the Menu Bar not realizing that the Menu Bar isn't colored at all. It's just semi-transparent. So if you don't like the color of it change what's on your background and then you'll see that reflected in transparent elements like the Menu Bar.