I disabled dithering on Apple silicon + Introducing Stillcolor macOS M1/M2/M3

thorpee

I had a workable mac (M1 air hooked up to 27inch Cinema display, laptop shut) Worked well with Stillcolor until I installed a web development app that somehow changed something and I then got eye strain.

I've since discovered that the app had flipped it to 10bit color mode. On the original setup I must've choose 8bit when I was mucking around with Better display and not realised how important it was in my circumstances.

So yeah my workable settings are StillColor running and Better display color mode set to 8bit, oh and I have font smoothing turned off via terminal command too. If I get strain again I will now know to click 8bit again.

macsforme

thorpee I previously followed your post in another thread where you had an iMac that was normally comfortable but you found you had to reinstall the OS after certain apps triggered eye strain. In retrospect, do you think it may have been a similar issue to this?

async

Did anyone find a way to change ioreg properties in dictionaries? This one seems interesting.

thorpee

macsforme

Possibly. I may have spoke to soon. Today i installed premiere which comes with Adobe media encoder. It seems to have flipped a switch again. And toggling 8bit does not help. I'll try reinstalling the OS when I have time. I think something changes on an OS level. My work supplied intel imac pro is unusable now as it upgraded the firmware

FNP7

waydabber Better Display is great! Thank you (and everyone on this forum who is helping make progress in this space). I used to create a virtual display, which eased my symptoms but still gave me some strain after a bit. The option to disable dithering I think helps, but the image adjustment makes the biggest difference. I mean the one with the bar chart icon that flattens the colours slightly (sorry, I can't see what it's called). Setting that to 35 means I can use the display for hours without issues and without creating a virtual display. Probably a stupid question, but there's no way of replicating any of this on iOS, is there? Thanks again for Better Display. It's brilliant!

madmozg

FNP7 could you share which devices you are using with better display ?

Rikl

FNP7 Which setting from the top of the Image Adjustments menu. Thanks.

waydabber

async Yes, I use a low level API for that. There are actually several APIs to manage Presets, including a high level one that Apple made for System Settings - it's a bit clumsy but otherwise works fine. If you are interested, I can send you the details, but you'll need to do heavy coding to utilize it.

FNP7 Thank you! Many of the techniques should work on iOS/iPadOS as well, but did not experiment with it.

Donux Yes, you can use terminal commands. Download betterdisplaycli or just use the binary inside the app bundle. Example:

betterdisplaycli set -n=displayname -quantization=0.5

Here is more help: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/wiki/Integration-features,-CLI

async I was planning to add some shader effects to BetterDisplay. Right now if Metal overlays are enabled in the app (a bit difficult to make that happen now as you need to change some awkward settings) you can do some simple color adjustments with it only (temperature, RGB control etc) - I primarily added this to support a night shift like effect on non-native displays (on which gamma table adjustments don't work) but did not expand the featureset much. So much to do…

FNP7

madmozg Sure, M2 MacBook Air 2023, 15-inch

async

Rikl Quantization. Color table modificatioins needs to be enabled for it to work.

Rikl

async Which slider - icon - position? The latest BD has only icons on the sliders not labels. Thanks.

Nevermind - got it.

FNP7

Rikl In case helpful to anyone else, here are the settings I'm using

async

Rikl You can turn on labels in the settings somewhere. It helps a lot.

Donux

FNP7 What is that bar chart icon measure ? And can it be done over the terminal, as I just do not want to pay for yet another app claiming miracles?

Rikl

FNP7 Thank you.

Rikl

Donux It's the numder of colors. 0-255 to the left. Unlimited default. It's available in the trial version. Give it a go.

Rikl

async Top of the menu settings. Doh. Thanks for that.

async

Did anyone ever see a working solution for overlay shaders on Mac? I know there are a ton that work inside games, and ofc lots of them on windows. BetterTouchTool can do color shifts with Metal overlay, but I have no idea how well Metal would be for more advanced use cases.

If someone knows a rough direction that probably will work for overlaying a texture on everything that is white or similar do tell. I can ofc do some sort of screen capture in Electron and just use overlay effects, but it will probably kill whatever CPU you have.

Experimenting a bit with adjustments that makes horrible migraine inducing patterns like this one stop blinking. I think I've found some things that work.

anon123

async Have you checked this?
https://github.com/belvederef/visual-snow-relief-overlay/releases/tag/v1.6.1
It is not that heavy on the CPU, but the most annoying thing for me is that it is seen as a "space" in Mission Control.
It helped me in the past, but it's not a true solution. If you find a way to incorporate your overlay, let me know.

async

thorpee Does it get better with a simple reboot?

thorpee

async No rebooting did nothing. I tried toggling everything I could. Luckily I have a Mac Mini M1 working atm which I'd migrated the air setup to before I installed Adobe Media encoder. I thought the Mini did not work for me but it was on 10bit color mode so changing that to 8bit seemed to fix it. It's annoying some apps trigger something for me.

async

thorpee in BetterDisplay. Try switching resolution, toggling hidpi and enabling color profile support in settings and changing it back and forth. If that doesn't help see if there are login items for premiere that could be disabled. You could also try to cover the light sensor next to the webcam to see if that improves it, as that chabge the screen. I'm pretty certain things switch on the macbook, but it's quite hard to pinpoint what is actually happening.

« Previous Page Next Page »