Calibrating screen colours

Tetranome

Hia! So I've noticed that my Macbook Pro and my desktop PC have significantly different display results. I'm currently producing my next demo reel piece and the lighting looks great on my PC, however on the Macbook it's definitely too dark and has more contrast. Is there a piece of software I can use to try and get both displays to match each-other, as well as most of the PCs that will be used to view my demo piece?

Thank you!
-T

Joost

For perfect calibration, you could use a tool like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Datacolor-Spyder5PRO-Colorimeter-USB-Connector/dp/B00UBSL31Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1469664949&sr=8-1&keywords=spyder+5

I'd say it's a good long-term investment but if it's too costly there're some applications that will allow you to calibrate a monitor without any hardware. Though I don't think the results will be spectacular. 
http://www.calibrize.com/

CheeseOnToast

The last few (PC, not Mac) monitors I've used have had pretty good factory defaults. Using a Spyder as Joost linked above made very little change. The overall default colours were just a tiny bit too yellow/warm. If you've bought a decent monitor for your PC relatively recently it's probably not too far from good colour to begin with, unless you have things like "dynamic constrast" or "vibrant" on by default in the settings.

Add3r

Yeah first things would be to turn off ANY sort of dynamic setting, whatsoever.  This will help keep the image consistent.  While I agree most new, high end monitors and TV's have good default settings, some tend to be visually good but on a mathematical level would be way off from what your eyes are actually seeing due to the monitor/TV compensating through artificial value adjustments.  

I highly recommend getting a Calman or Spyder if you want to calibrate properly.   I am going through really similar things right now at work, where we are mass calibrating hundreds of TV's and monitors.  We bought 25 of the same TV, and tried calibrating one and copying the settings to all 24 others, just to visually test the results.  Way off, not even remotely close to each other in terms of hue and saturation of different colors.  We would have one way off in the blue spectrum, 2-3 others WAY more orange/yellow, etc.  We ended up having to calibrate each individual TV using our CalMan calibration puck, by hand, to get consistent results across the board.  

TL;DR, if you are serious about calibration, the investment is 110% worth it.  Trust me, every single panel displays uniquely.  

Tetranome

Thats great, thanks for all that guys. I'll keep that little device in mind

Tetranome

But if I calibrate them to each other they might not match what everyone else has ^_^

Tetranome

Good advice - thank you

0xffff

Perna pretty much the entire VFX industry disagrees with you tbh lol. Doing calibration gives pretty significant improvements, I've seen the before/after in studio environments and it's definitely worth doing (to clarify, games studio environments).

0xffff

Hmmmm, well, that image I posted above. If that concept isn't convincing to you then we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

0xffff

@perna Weird, thats what I get for being lazy and copy/pasting the image into the reply window though I guess. Should be fixed now.