I think this is a duplicate of an old question without a good answer: Display appears different on two accounts using same color profile
My child was doing schoolwork on her school-issued Macbook Air. Suddenly lighter greys are totally white. This generally gives the images on the screen a vague feeling of being "off", and pixellates all curved edges. The biggest problem is that text on some of her sites is unreadable.
I've checked the following:
- Color profiles – it looked like it was using the default, but a cycled through a few built-ins. I could see noticeable changes to color balance, but the light greys remained the same as white. Also deleted contents of
~/Library/ColorSync/. - Accessibility – my child has accidentally inverted colors before, this isn't that. No other accessibility settings seemed related to color.
- Display settings – Modifying brightness was also fruitless. The screen overall got brighter or darker, but still couldn't distinguish between light grey and white
- Rebooting – colors look fine until shortly after logging in – seems connected to user profile somehow.
Here are some images to demonstrate the issue. This is a generic color test image:
On the Mac, it looks like this (simulated with photoshop):
Any solution would be appreciated, but if there is a keyboard shortcut that can cause this, it would be the most likely explanation (8 year old says they "might have rested their arms on the keyboard" during a class meeting)
Best Answer
Best guess is Display Contrast.
That will affect the on-screen image, but will not translate to a screenshot. Screenshots are taken before that filter is reached. The on-screen image will be affected similarly to your Photoshopped version. [It will actually compress the blacks a bit too, so not exactly the same as your image.] Almost like putting a really agressive curve on it -
System Prefs > Accessibility > Display. [from Mojave, things may have moved a bit in Big Sur]
Set Display Contrast hard left for 'normal'. All other checkboxes in there should be off, except shake mouse.
There is a key command for it, though I would expect that by default this would be inactive…
System Prefs > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Accessibility