How to Use the Apple TV's Color Balance Feature to Optimize Your Picture

Here at PCMag, we value accurate color performance on TVs. It’s one of the main things we test when we review them, using special equipment to measure just how close each TV can come to broadcast and digital cinema standards. Colors can usually be tuned if they aren’t accurate out of the box, but doing so requires calibration, a pricey and time-consuming process that requires the same equipment we use for testing.

Or, if you have an Apple TV, you can now simply use your iPhone. Apple introduced a Color Balance feature on its Apple TV media streamers with the most recent tvOS update, letting you automatically calibrate your TV, or at least tweak the signal the Apple TV sends out to make the colors more accurate.

We tested the feature to see just how effective it is, especially since most recent TVs are already pretty accurate when set to the right picture mode (Calibrated, Cinema, Movie, or another similarly named mode, with the white balance at the warmest preset). Apple's Color Balance is definitely an improvement over out-of-the-box settings, though we also suggest choosing the right picture mode on your TV for the best performance.

How to Use the Apple TV's Color Balance

The Color Balance process is incredibly simple, as long as you have an iPhone with Face ID and both your iPhone and Apple TV (with tvOS 14.5 or higher, which includes the current and previous generation of Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD) are on the same Wi-Fi network.

It works by using the Apple TV to send a signal that shows a series of colors on your TV, then measuring those colors with the iPhone's Face ID camera to determine how accurate they are. With that information, the Apple TV can adjust how it outputs colors to make them more accurate.

Here’s how to do it, step by step:

1. Go to the Settings menu

2. Select Video and Audio

3. Select Color Balance, under Calibration near the bottom of the menu

4. Unlock your iPhone

5. Tap the Apple TV prompt that appears

6. Tap Continue

7. Flip your phone over so the screen faces your TV and hold it close to the glowing blue rectangle

8. Wait for a series of colors and white flashes to cycle inside the rectangle—the TV will indicate when the process is done

9. Select Balanced to set the Apple TV to output with the color corrected profile instead of the default balance

Keep in mind, this calibration only applies to the Apple TV and anything you watch on it. It doesn’t change the color balance of any other device connected to the TV, or any app you might use through the TV itself.

Is Apple's Color Balance Effective?

We tested the Apple TV’s Color Balance feature on an LG C1 OLED TV, which won our TechX award for its class-leading color accuracy.

In Cinema mode, the TV has almost perfect color out of the box, so we instead put it in the much less accurate Vivid mode and set the Apple TV to output an HDR10 signal instead of Dolby Vision. We then used a Klein K-80 colorimeter and Portrait Displays' Calman software to measure the TV’s color levels using the Apple TV’s SMPTE color bars test pattern. These color levels are compared against DCI-P3 digital cinema standards, which an HDR signal would try to reach.

As the chart above shows, Vivid mode throws off white significantly, cooling it while slightly undersaturating green. Red and blue are still spot-on (this is a very good TV, even when you try to mess up the colors), but cyan and yellow are thrown far off. 

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I then ran the Color Balance process on the second-generation Apple TV 4K with an iPhone 12, keeping the same settings on the TV. The above chart shows that the process improves the color accuracy a bit, pushing white, cyan, and magenta in the right direction. However, it leaves those colors still well outside of DCI-P3 levels.

This final chart shows the TV’s color levels in Cinema mode, using the same HDR10 signal. This is from simply putting the TV in a more accurate picture mode, without any input from an iPhone or correction from an Apple TV. White and nearly all colors are spot-on, though green is still slightly undersaturated.

It's Still Important to Choose the Right Picture Mode

What does all of this mean? The Apple TV’s Color Balance feature does indeed tweak the image so that it's closer to accurate than it would be by default. However, it doesn’t come close to working as well as simply setting your TV to its Cinema or Movie mode, which will make colors much more accurate without any other adjustments. If you really want to get the best picture out of your TV, check out our tips for doing so.

If you have a cheaper TV that might not be quite as accurate even in the right picture mode, you can run Color Balance to nudge those colors a bit closer to ideal. It won't have the precision of a professional calibration (which uses meters that are much more sensitive than your iPhone's camera), but it might improve accuracy slightly. Don't expect a big change, though, and remember it won't apply to anything outside of the Apple TV.

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