For pro photographers who care about color fidelity on a laptop screen, there's good news from Rob Galbraith on the revamped MacBook Pro line: the new laptops offer improved color performance, which Rob's review describes as "better colour accuracy than any Apple laptop we've profiled since...2001." Color accuracy, display evenness and grayscale viewing are all noted as excellent; the only sore spots are viewing angle and the grating lack of matte screen options for anything but the 17" top model. He notes that TechRestore may begin offering matte-screen replacements for the smaller units soon, for those who can't tolerate the glossy glare.

Not everyone is satisfied with the MBP screens, however. Designer Louie Mantia of the Iconfactory has a bone to pick with the screen quality of his new 13" unit; it's sporting a 6-bit display, which has been an issue with color-sensitive professionals for years now. To add insult to injury, the Apple store sold Louie the wrong DisplayPort adapter for his external display, and nobody at Apple HQ is willing to give him an answer on whether or not an 8-bit panel is even an option (hint: it's not, sorry about that). One could argue, as he does, that a 'Pro' machine ought to have a professional-quality panel... but that campaign's not likely to get much traction in the halls of Cupertino.

Via Apple Hot News

A lot of us might not care that the color on our screens doesn't precisely match reality, but for most designers color matching is a crucial part of their work. That's why they use monitor calibration systems like the new La Cie blue eye pro Proof Edition (US$429.99) to make sure that what they see on the screen is exactly what they'll see on a finished product.

The blue eye pro Proof Edition is the blue puck that you see on the left side of the photo illustration at right. It supports monitor calibration and profiling and can provide UGRA (Swiss Center of Competence for Media and Printing Technology) soft proof testing and reporting.

La Cie has announced immediate availability of the blue eye pro Proof Edition, which is compatible with the Adobe Creative Suite, QuarkXPress, Aperture and other design and photography applications. it requires Mac OS X 10.4.5 or later on Intel Macs, as well as a USB port for connectivity.

Apple has released Pro Applications Update 2008-04, which includes updates to Final Cut Pro, Compressor, Color, DVD Studio Pro, Cinema Tools, Motion, Soundtrack Pro and Shake. The update, according to Apple, "addresses general performance issues and improves overall stability."

No specific details were provided about what the update improved about each software component, other than to say each update "addresses specific customer issues and general performance issues." The updates are recommended for all users of the software.

The update includes the following versions:

• Final Cut Pro 6.0.5
• Compressor 3.0.5
• Shake 4.1.1
• DVD Studio Pro 4.2.1
• Cinema Tools 4.0.1
• Motion 3.0.2
• Color 1.0.3
• Soundtrack Pro 2.0.2

The update is available from Apple's website.

Thanks, Clancy!

Colors is a palette generator and editor for the iPhone and iPod touch which updated yesterday to version 1.1 with new features which make it a truly useful tool for working with those hues, tints and shades we come across every day.

Colors is primarily directed at web designers and those working with RGB and Hex colors. It allows conversion between RGB, HSB and grayscale, as well as integer and floating point scales for other screen applications. As of version 1.1, Colors can handle saving multiple palettes, each containing up to 12 colors and saved with individual labels. Manipulating palettes is as easy as dragging sliders and pulling swatches into the color wells at the bottom of the screen. Palettes can be emailed to yourself (or anyone else, with multiple recipients possible) in Photoshop and Illustrator palette formats, accompanied by a bitmap image and a text file of RGB and Hex numbers for each color.

Perhaps the slickest new feature in version 1.1 is the ability to work with photos, either from your iPhone or iPod touch's library, or directly from the iPhone camera. Colors automatically generates palettes based on the visible portion of the image, regenerating whenever the image is zoomed or panned. I found that Colors did a great job of pulling the essential tones from the image, although the palettes tend to default to somewhat subdued colors even when the source image is saturated and vibrant. That's easily fixed with a little post-processing on the palette, using the saturation and brightness sliders in the HSB tab of the editor.

Colors 1.1 is available at the App Store for $2.99USD. If you're in the business of colors, at least those in the RGB gamut, it's worth checking out.

If you're willing to go the extra mile (and paycheck) to customize your gadgets, but you're not a big fan of the flashy ColorWare colors that we've covered before, the new custom edition matte black iPhone (Stealth iPhone) may be the ticket.

ColorWare has been making drastic hue adjustments on iPhones for a while and recently announced that their color-customizing services were available for the MacBook Air. While they've offered a gloss black before, the new "stealth" iPhone's matte black finish is a departure from their usual eye-catching pigments. I imagine it's also more appealing to a good number of people.

The customization is only available on new phones purchased from ColorWare, and with the matte black customization your new iPhone will run you $675 for the 8GB iPhone, $775 for the 16 GB. A 1-year warranty is standard, but you can extend that to two years for an additional $149. You can find more details on the ColorWare site.

Macs, in general, have always been works of art compared to their rivals, and the MacBook Air is a pinnacle achievement in the line of lust-worthy Apple computers. There's just never been a lot of color choice in the Apple's lineup. For the audacious souls who choose to express their personality through their hardware, ColorWare has been making Macs (et al) into vibrant articulations of individuality for 8 years. And now they'll deck out your Air, too.

ColorWare recently announced the inclusion of the MacBook Air in its line of color-modded machines. Starting with a sleek black, the pigmentation possibilities branch out exponentially when you consider there are 34 other colors that can be mixed and matched in whatever combination best describes your individual taste. You can choose a metallic or solid type of color for the high-gloss, scratch-resistant, polymer-based coating.

For a lot of us – well, me anyway – I'm pretty happy with titanium and white as I've never needed my computer to be a distraction in and of itself. I have enough applications designed for that purpose. But I know there are more than a few people excited about a black MacBook Air, probably even a few tickled about the pink option and many more in the spectrum between.

You can send in your current machine ($500+) or buy one ready to go ($2568+). You can even play with the possibilities before you make the leap.

There are quite a few OS X applications and plugins available to make life easier for Mac-loving designers of any ilk. I'd like to highlight a few that have earned a place my heart (or my color picker). Most of these tools apply to any 2D designer, whether you make websites, interfaces or spend your time in the world of hardcopy. The price to value ratio varies, so I leave it up to you to determine whether any particular tool is of enough value to add to your arsenal. And don't worry, there are some freebies.

Earlier, I posted about how you can revert those new lights in Leopard's Dock back to Tiger's old triangles (and I can't say I was too surprised to find out that most of you didn't want to revert anything-- do what feels right, man), and I said that the next thing to go would be Leopard's shiny Dock-top.

And now, here we go-- Something Awful's echobucket has apparently found the files that need to be changed to edit the look of the dock. As with the triangles, the Dock elements have a few sizes to them, so replace the "scruve-x.png" files (where x is "l," "m," "sm," or "xl") in the Dock package's /Contents/Resources folder (make sure to back up the original files just in case, too), and then type "killall Dock" in the Terminal to restart it, and bingo, a slightly less bright dock.

In fact, just by changing the color of those pictures, you can change the color of the Dock itself (here's an orange dock on a black background for Halloween, via Digg commenter HacKing). It can't be too long before some enterprising programmer figures out how to put all of this inside an easy-to-use app, but here's the real question: if it's all this easy, why didn't Apple offer us this kind of customization ourselves? Sure, when you hand the paintbrushes to the people, things can get ugly, but they can also get much more beautiful, too.

[via Digg]

Apple Hacker Mauricio Pastrana discovered a way to export composite video from his Apple TV in full color. He gives all the details in this handy YouTube tutorial. Normally, when you use composite out from AppleTV, you're limited to black and white video from the green channel. Instead, if you plug in HDMI output (he uses an HDMI-DVI adapter with a DVI-VGA adapter attached), and then switch resolutions with that attached, wait about 5 seconds, and reattach your RCA cable to the green channel, it suddenly switches to full composite color.

I haven't tested this myself, so let me know if it works for you.

Okay this one is a little shaky because my French is non-existent. But in this post (Google translation) at the French Mac site MacBidouille, they present evidence that the LCD panel in the new 20" iMacs is not a 24bit color panel as in the previous generation, but an 18bit panel instead. Support for this includes the Kodawarisan take-apart photos which appear to show the panel as a LG PHILIPS LM201WE3. This panel seems to be a TN (twisted nematic) display most of which, according to wikipedia, "...are unable to display the full 16.7 million colors (24-bit truecolor) available from modern graphics cards." Other discussions online seem to support this conclusion.

Of course, we heard complaints before about color reproduction on Apple LCD displays. If true, this is consistent with the reviews (e.g. Macworld magazine) that have complained about the quality of the 20" screen versus that of the 24" iMac. If correct this would be a powerful reason to prefer the 24" iMac, particularly if color accuracy is very important to you (e.g. for working with photos).

Thanks Gabriel!

The day is finally here. After an introductory video back in May and a more in-depth teaser earlier this month, the Pixelmator crew have begun sending out the private beta downloads and I just took it for a spin, creating the image in this post. It is indeed a sexy app - the UI is a gorgeous translucent black, and it really does offer a lot of functionality and innovation aimed squarely at Adobe Photoshop or, perhaps more appropriately, Photoshop Elements. While Pixelmator is still very much a beta and too buggy for shop or casual work, I am able to play with most of the promised features, including snapping pics from an iSight, the iPhoto browser and all the powerful color and manipulation tools.

Thankfully, Saulius and the Pixelmator crew gave me permission to write up some initial thoughts with screenshots, so check out a preliminary Pixelmator gallery I've put together of some handy features and clever details, and read on for more of my first impressions of this highly anticipated image editor.

Apple has historically been - and to a certain point sill is - a pretty darn colorful company. True, Jobs and Ive seem to prefer to stick to grayscale for their flagship products (iMac, iPod, MacPro, MacBook/Pro, mini, etc), there is always a dash of color to be found somewhere in the Apple product lineup. All of the colors in the old logo (plus some extras) have graced the outside of at least one Apple device; all, that is, except for Yellow.

As one would expect, Yellow isn't too thrilled that he's been left out of all of the fun, even if there were good reasons for doing so. As a way of expressing his distaste with the way things have been going, Yellow has published an open letter to Apple in which it makes arguments not only for itself being used in upcoming products, but a few of it's chromatic friends as well.

John Gruber has released a command line tool called BBColors which allows BBEdit and TextWrangler users to save, reload and even share customized color schemes. BBEdit, like many code-friendly text editors, has offered a coloring system for some time, but it still doesn't allow users to save and swap out schemes for, say, different languages or simply different days of the week. John's free utility not only brings color swapping to these app's tool belts, but he also posted a few examples to help get your feet wet. DeviantART, eat your heart out.

Instructions for installation and usage can be found on Mr. Gruber's project page for BBColors.

I'm not a huge fan of color in the menu bar, but that probably stems from the fact that I'm not a huge fan of color in the rest of my operating environment (and why I use the graphite visual style). However, it seems that there are a good many people want their OS to look like it was made by Fischer Price, and that's where iColon and MenuPics come in. These two applications both do exactly the same thing; add a dash of color to the otherwise drab utilitarian menu icons sitting in the top-right corner of your screen. The only real differences between the two are universal binary status (iColon is, MenuPics isn't) and how many customization options they give you (iColon only adds color to the normal Bluetooth, Airport, and Battery Meter, while MenuPics gives you the choice to change the icons all together.)