Using the Eizo with an Apple Laptop

I use the Eizo with a Macbook Pro, and when using Photoshop CS4  I  have all the palettes on the laptop screen and the big image on the monitor, the same applies when using Capture One Pro [my preferred Raw Converter especially as I work tethered, for capturing images]

It soon came apparent though, that images displayed on my Eizo, especially skin tones and reds were displaying far more intensly than the laptop. At first I thought it must be the wider colour gamut of the monitor displaying colours that I could not see previously. But that begged question “how will it look in print”  So I printed out a proof from my printer which has been custom profiled and therefore fairly close to Photoshop’s soft proofing on the monitor. The result was skin tones and reds were absolutely fine. Obviously the problem lay with the monitor or so it seemed. Something was not quite right? Tried re-calibration of the monitor but nothing changed. I know one should not judge colour from a laptop screen, but my  laptop screen has been good enough to see heavy colour casts and the images looked fine on it.  So I started to investigate a little deeper. Found some really information from Eizo and Adobe regarding using Open GL Draw in CS4 with multi monitors It is the case that when Open GL Drawing is enabled, the colour management is only correct on the primary monitor [In this case the laptop screen}. The only work around at the moment is to go to your Photoshop Preferences menu, choose Performance, then deselect Open Gl Drawing in the checkbox and then reboot Photoshop.

After switching off the GL capability my monitor displays fine. The downside is that you know longer have the capability to use the GPU to use the functions that are some of the new features of Photoshop CS4, such as animation zoom and canvas rotation. Instead, it workse like the earlier versions of Photoshop in which the zoom feature was not so smooth and somewhat 'jagged' at odd number zooms [33.3% 67.7%]. But, I think it is a small price to have the colour displaying properly. If anyone knows of any other solution I would like to know.

Eizo Monitor with Open GL Draw on

Eizo Monitor with Open GL Draw off

Photoshop CS4 Preference Pane showing Checkbox