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

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you 8 different ways you can adjust the colors on your Mac's screen. 

So there are many ways you can adjust how colors look on your Mac's screen. A lot of these depend on which model Mac you've got and also whether or not you're using a third party external display or not. So let's start by going to the most obvious place. 

That would be System Settings. The to Display or Displays. Then here you can choose the Display first. So I'm going to select, for instance, the Studio Display here, one of two screens I have connected. Then I'm going to go down here to the Preset, which is the color profile. Then here I can set the Color Profile. What you see is going to depend on which Display you have, whether you have it is a built-in one, an Apple one, a third party one, and also software you have installed. Some software may install specialty profiles here, like Adobe stuff. You can also go to Custom Presets. There are all sorts of custom presets here. You can also go down to Calibrate or depending upon your Mac you may see Customize here. Then you go into a specialty utility. Since I have an Apple Studio Display here it is going to go to the Apple Pro Display Calibrator. But you may instead go to the Display Calibrator Assistant for say a MacBook. Here you can do calibrations.

Now, this is really for Pros. Those that have to have the colors on the screen match other displays and also maybe match what is printed either on their own printer or going to a publication like a magazine or book or something like that. Pros like that are usually used to dealing with calibrations although we certainly can use these to make screens look a little bit different or a little better for our eyes if we wish. Notice here if I switch to my third party display on my second display things change here at the bottom. The Preset changes to Color Profile and I can choose from Color Profiles and there, sure enough, is Customize and I can select from these here. Very different. I can click Plus and then end up at that Display Calibrator Assistant instead. 

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Now for most of us it is easier to simply use tools like True Tone here which will look at the lighting condition and adjust the colors appropriately. You may or may not see these depending upon what display you've got. But you can certainly turn this On and see if this helps. For me, in my current conditions, it is making the screen colors a lot warmer right now when I have it on than when I've got it switched off. 

Another simple option you've got is Night Shift. It is this button down here. The idea here is that you have the colors look different at night versus the day. You probably have windows in the room where you use your Mac and you probably have a lot more light during the day than at night when you have artificial light. You can schedule this to go On sunset to sunrise or customize the time and you can turn it on temporarily, just like right now. You can see how it changes the color there to look a lot warmer. You can adjust it here like you want. The idea here is to have color changes at night that would help you then transition from using your Mac to then going to sleep. 

Now a much more obvious and direct way to change how your screen looks is to go to System Settings and then Appearance. Then at the top you've got Light and Dark Modes. Dark mode will change everything. Makes everything much darker, changes your wallpaper, it changes how all the different windows work, and for a lot of apps it changes the text. You can see white text on a black background here in System Settings and also in Notes. It won't change things everywhere. For instance, if you go to Safari notice that webpages, for the most part, still retain black text on a white background. The Style Sheets on webpages will override any kind of dark mode that you have turned on and display exactly as the web designer intended. Notice though the interface for Safari is, in fact, using Dark Mode. In addition to switching on dark you can also go to Auto and have it automatically go to Dark Mode at night and light mode during the day. 

Now a lot of times when people are talking about color of the Mac's screen they are not talking about all the colors, but about specific ones. Notice, for instance, here in Settings that the accent color here is blue. Whatever I select on the left shows up as blue and blue is used in switches and radio buttons, like this, little outlines like this. But if I go to Notes here notice that yellow is used instead in similar situations. So the deal is that apps can have their own accent and highlight colors. But you can force an accent color on all apps that have their own custom one. For instance I can force purple here. So by going from multicolor to purple you can see now System Settings is using purple as the accent color. It also changes the highlight color to a purple although I can customize the highlight color to be something completely different. So let's change the highlight color to orange, like this. You'll see purple used as an accent color here. Also notice now in Notes purple is forced on it as the accent color and orange is forced on it as the highlight color because that is what we are doing here. So you have the choice as to whether apps can use their own preset color or you force a color on all apps throughout the system. 

Another place you can go to adjust colors is under Accessibility and then Display. When you go there you have lots of options that will help you adjust colors. For instance, you can turn on Increase Contrast. Watch carefully at what happens to the gray color used by these windows and also the Menu Bar. When I turn on Increase Contrast you can see how they become solid light gray colors. So watch when I turn it Off and you can see there's a color to the Menu Bar and a display color to these windows as well. It is hard to even see that so you turn on Increase Contrast and then you can see it without the color. Increase Contrast also gives you these outlines around things and makes everything very sharp. You can turn that Off and simply get the reduced transparency for the Menu Bar and Windows by turning on Reduce Transparency all by itself. 

Now let's get back to this idea here that the Menu Bar has a color to it. It actually doesn't. It is just semi-transparent or translucent. It takes on the colors behind it. The windows do to a smaller amount. That's why when you turn on Reduce Transparency you can see the change there. So this means that the color of the Menu Bar and other things are actually coming from the Desktop Wallpaper. So we change the Wallpaper by going to System Settings, Wallpaper, like this. If you change to a different wallpaper with different colors, like let's go to the Monterey purples here. When I change to that notice how the Menu Bar now has a purple tint instead. It is a very slight effect but it is there for the Windows.

So if your problem is that if you don't like the color for the Menu Bar you can turn off with that Increased Contrast setting or you can simply change the color of the wallpaper. Choose something else. If you were to choose a photo or one of these arial views, for instance, then you could see how it changes to match that. In fact you can go down further in Wallpapers here and choose a solid color for the background. So you can choose, say, a purple or you can choose, say, a red and you can see how the Menu Bar changes like that. You can click the Plus button here and choose any color you want. Of course, you can go further down here and choose pictures and in fact you can Drag & Drop anything in here and use your own photos or a graphic that you made up for your Desktop background. 

Now another way to tint the color of the display is to go back to Accessibility and then to Display again. Further down here there are some settings called Color Filters. You can turn this On and then select the Filter Type. For instead you can choose Grayscale and have everything be grayscale. But you can choose a red green, green red or blue yellow filter there as well. However, the bottom one Color Tint allows you to choose any color. Click here and it brings up all the colors. So I can choose a green say and then you can choose the intensity for the tinting. So you can have a slight tint to your favorite color or color you find that makes it easier for you to read text or view images or whatever you like. 

Now there is one more way to change the colors on your display that applies particularly to third party displays. You've got a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio and have hooked up a third party display or maybe a third party display is a second screen for your MacBook. Most of the time there are hardware buttons on that display that allow you to access a Menu. In that menu you can adjust color settings. So keep that in mind especially if you are using, say, a MacBook screen and a third party display bring up the same wallpaper or perhaps the same photo on both displays and then try to use the hardware settings on that third party display to adjust the colors to get it to look a little bit more like your MacBook's display so it is consistent across both. 

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.