At first when I saw the new mbps did True Tone I was like ‘oh cool’. Now I’m thinking about it... when I’m designing I need to know my colours are representative. And surely this affects any pro that works in a visually based medium. So designers, video guys, 3d artists, photographers.... I’m no longer sure about True Tone on an MBP.
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True Tone in 2018 MacBook Pro Extends to LG UltraFine and Apple Thunderbolt Displays
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The danger with true tone is that if you ever work in color grading or retouching, it can greatly mess up your work. There's nothing worse than disabling true tone or night shift, and having everything look horribly blue for half an hour. Or worse, if you don't disable it, then things will look wrong depending on what kind of lighting was in the room at the time of retouching, so you can't win. You have to turn it off and keep it off all the time so that your eyes are always adjusted to the screen's white, rather than that of the room.
Then there's the question of whether your audience will be viewing your work on a true tone display or not. You have to grade assuming that your audience doesn't have true tone, so that you have a sort of absolute reference point. Now if they do have true tone, no one knows how things will look to them, because the algorithm works differently in every room and you can't account for that.
By shifting the white point of the display, you're actually lowering the number of colors the display can represent. If the color values went from say 0,0,0 to 100,100,100, then the new values would go from 0,0,0 to something like 100,100,70. And with true tone, you never know what's going on because it's always changing, so in one room you'll have a different color space than in another room. That is, unless the actual color of the backlight was changing, and not the pixels themselves. But that's unlikely to be the case.
Soon we'll have a bunch of devices all equipped with randomly fluctuating white points. This is fine if you're going to read books and look at simple web pages. But if you ever want to look at photos and movies, or do work on them, then you can forget about this feature.
Through the wonders of biology, you will accept as "white" the closest thing to white that you happen to be looking at. If that's a computer screen, you'll adapt to it. The screen shouldn't adapt to you. On a phone screen, this makes sense because it's too small and you spend too little time on it to adapt. But on a computer screen that you may be using for hours, it's a different story.
Imagine if headphones started adapting to the acoustics of the room around you, generating new EQs for each new environment. Musicians would go crazy.
Then there's the question of whether your audience will be viewing your work on a true tone display or not. You have to grade assuming that your audience doesn't have true tone, so that you have a sort of absolute reference point. Now if they do have true tone, no one knows how things will look to them, because the algorithm works differently in every room and you can't account for that.
By shifting the white point of the display, you're actually lowering the number of colors the display can represent. If the color values went from say 0,0,0 to 100,100,100, then the new values would go from 0,0,0 to something like 100,100,70. And with true tone, you never know what's going on because it's always changing, so in one room you'll have a different color space than in another room. That is, unless the actual color of the backlight was changing, and not the pixels themselves. But that's unlikely to be the case.
Soon we'll have a bunch of devices all equipped with randomly fluctuating white points. This is fine if you're going to read books and look at simple web pages. But if you ever want to look at photos and movies, or do work on them, then you can forget about this feature.
Through the wonders of biology, you will accept as "white" the closest thing to white that you happen to be looking at. If that's a computer screen, you'll adapt to it. The screen shouldn't adapt to you. On a phone screen, this makes sense because it's too small and you spend too little time on it to adapt. But on a computer screen that you may be using for hours, it's a different story.
Imagine if headphones started adapting to the acoustics of the room around you, generating new EQs for each new environment. Musicians would go crazy.
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