True Tone external displays

richardtstovall · October 25, 2021, 1:34pm

Last week I began using my 16" MBP with an external display instead of my 2015 iMac in anticipation of the M1 Pro goodness being delivered tomorrow. I noticed my Dell monitor was a little yellow, but didn’t think anything of it.

This morning I turned off the lights in my office and the monitor immediately changed color temp. Much to my surprise turning off True Tone reverted the color temp! I was shocked that True Tone works with my Dell monitor!

I love True Tone when portable, but my Dell monitor doesn’t handle it as well in my office. Is there any way to disable True Tone ONLY when my external monitor is connected?

RosemaryOrchard · October 25, 2021, 2:53pm

I have this in my bookmarks for BetterTouchTool as a widget to toggle the status of True Tone:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/HanSooloo/259fa73a0755eddf985cff01e3d5bd9f

TrueTone.scpt

tell application "System Events"
	if (get name of every application process) contains "System Preferences" then
		set _isSysPrefRunning to true
	else
		set _isSysPrefRunning to false
	end if
end tell
log _isSysPrefRunning

use sys : application "System Events"

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It’s an AppleScript, so you’ll need a way to trigger it (after modifying it). Something like Keyboard Maestro could do that for sure - there might be another better solution though!

richardtstovall · October 26, 2021, 1:12pm

This is fantastic! I’ll probably give this a shot with a keyboard shortcut. That will be slightly faster than the submenu>sub-submenu dance that is Monterey’s menu bar display setting pane.