Modern MacBooks and iMacs feature an advanced sensor technology called “True Tone.” Instead of simply adjusting the brightness of your screen, True Tone actively measures the ambient colour temperature of the room you are sitting in and dynamically alters the white balance of your display to match it. If you are sitting in a room with warm, yellow incandescent bulbs, your Mac screen will shift to a warmer, yellowish hue. If you move outside into bright daylight, it will shift to a cooler, bluer hue.
While this is designed to make reading text easier on your eyes by mimicking how paper reflects light, it is an absolute disaster for creative professionals. If you are editing photographs in Lightroom, colour-grading video in Premiere Pro, or designing a logo in Illustrator, you must see the exact, objective colours of your file, not an artificially warmed version that changes depending on the weather outside. For color-accurate work, you must disable True Tone.
Disabling True Tone in System Settings
You can turn off this ambient adjustment feature instantly from the main display settings menu.
- Click the Apple Logo in the absolute top-left corner of your Mac’s screen.
- Select System Settings… from the dropdown menu (or “System Preferences” if you are running an older version of macOS).
- Scroll down the left-hand sidebar and click on Displays.
- In the main panel, look for the section detailing your built-in display’s brightness and colour profiles.
- Locate the toggle switch labelled True Tone (it will likely be positioned directly below the brightness slider).
- Click the switch to turn it Off.
The moment you click the switch, you will likely see your screen instantly “snap” back to a cooler, more clinical white balance. Your display is now showing raw, unedited colour values, ensuring that the photographs you edit on your Mac will look exactly the same when printed or viewed on other professional monitors.