Craig Weber

For whatever reason, macOS Catalina and Big Sur were both tinting my external monitor pink. Some research indicated that it had to do with the color mode, notably that I needed to force RGB. MacOS’s UI doesn’t give the user the ability to change the color mode directly, so you have to hack around the display profile files directly.

This post and its comments from 2013 seem to be the authoritative guide on forcing RGB mode; however, these steps (and the variations found in the comments) make you do a lot of things, including disabling the System Integrity Protection (basically the stuff that prevents even the super user from changing certain files and directories), booting into recovery mode, changing boot files (which can put your system into a boot loop, as I discovered the hard way), and a number of other dangerous, arcane things.

Fortunately, I found a sequence that is much safer and easier (tested on both Big Sur and Catalina on two distinct MacBook Pros):

This is a guide for Unix systems (OS X and Linux), but Windows users shouldn’t find it too difficult to figure out the equivalent commands for their platform. I’m not assuming much prior knowledge, but readers should at least be comfortable navigating around a Unix terminal, and any familiarity with environment variables is helpful (a quick Google search for “environment variables” should suffice). Without further ado: