Display may show black screen on wake when custom color profiles are installed and color table control is being used

[parkamonster]

I've had BetterDisplay Pro for over a year with no issues until now. This bug has been plaguing me for a few weeks.

I have a M2 Ultra Mac Studio and three connected displays. Kuycon G32P (USB C), Cintiq Pro 16 (USB C), and a EVICIV 22” Portable Monitor J522J23 (HDMI). I'm running Tahoe 26.6.2 and the latest version of BetterDisplay Pro.

Here's the issue: When returning to my Mac (with screens locked) I am unable to wake the screens. If I unplug the HDMI cable from the Mac, the screens would briefly wake up for a half second, and then immediately go black again. If I remote desktop into my Mac, I can interact with the Mac yet the screens never wake up. The only solution is to do a hard reboot with the power button, and then start up and the monitors are fine again until the next display sleep.

After a process of elimination I found that the culprit was BetterDisplay. The only way to get around it was to completely uninstall BetterDisplay and learn to live without it, which is very sad.

It seems like the issue might be similar to this bug #4723, but that is a laptop with a built in display, so perhaps not.

[waydabber]

It is probably an issue of using a custom color profile that has some errors in it, causing the black screen issue on macOS when an app uses gamma table adjustments.

Either use the display's factory profile (created by macOS automatically when connecting the display) or one of Apple's first party color profile (like Display P3 etc). Alternatively, you can generally disable color table adjustments in the app for Settings > Displays > Overview for compatibility mode.

Let me know whether this helps.

[parkamonster]

I work in the TV animation industry and need accurate color. I've profiled all three displays using my Calibrite Display Plus HL Colorimeter and I'm happy with how they look.

Sadly I can't use the factory default profiles for these three displays because they are just SO bad in my opinion, and none of them even come close to matching each other with their default profiles. The supplied Apple color profiles are not much better on these displays either (none of these are Apple displays, which always have great color out of the box).

Ok, I reinstalled BetterDisplay Pro with complete default settings (due to a full uninstall yesterday) and so far I am no longer seeing this issue. Perhaps a config file got corrupted along the way somehow? I'll keep an eye out for the issue and hopefully it won't return. If it does, I'll try your suggestion of disabling color table adjustments. Thanks for your suggestions.