In my event server Mac app, I prepare a lot of native cocoa composite images. I ran across a strange issue lately. My composite pictures when printed, seemed very dull compared with previous use of my cocoa app, which also were a bit on the dull side. I suspected the colour profile or image type of my starting templates to be the cause, but no matter what I did they appeared ok on the screen but dull when printed on my professional printer. Normal non-composite pictures printed perfectly. I discussed it with my Noritsu tech. We experimented with changes to the chroma, profile, brightness of a print channel of my printer. In the end we added chroma and contrast to the print channel of composite printer. A compromise.

Then on the last day of my 2 month event shoot, I noticed my Mac mini had an incorrect display profile. No big deal, so I changed it. Immediately the templates started coming out of my app, even brighter and darker. After some quick experimenting, the solution was wierd but obvious. For some reason the native cocoa app takes into account the display profile of the Mac it is running on. Oh well, I only spent countless hours and at least 50m of paper trying to figure it out in November/December. As good cocoa image documentation/examples can be rare, I actually had given up. Regardless, I am so happy to now have control of my templates again.