Spyder – the good and the ugly

There has been some noise recently on Planet Gnome about ColorVision Spyder2 support in Linux ArgyllCMS. Ross Burton reported success in profiling his display with this screen calibration device.

So I had to try for myself

Stefan Dohla provided an easy way to compile ArgyllCMS under Ubuntu Gutsy:

1. add yourself to the src group
# sudo vim /etc/group
change the line src:x:40: to src:x:40:yourusername
2. install the jam build tool – use FTJam
# sudo apt-get install ftjam
3. install the X11 XVidMode development package
# sudo apt-get install libxxf86vm-dev
4. create a directory for Argyll in /usr/src , e.g.
# mkdir argyllcms
and enter it
# cd argyllcms
5. download latest Argyll version (use a beta version if available)
# wget http://www.argyllcms.com/argyllV0.70Beta7_src.zip
6. unzip the downloaded file – watch out: there’s no folder created and the content is extracted into your current directory!
# unzip argyllV0.70Beta7_src.zip
7. Run the build script
# sh makeall.ksh

If all compilation goes well, go into the spectro directory. You should find there a spyd2en utility that takes a file from the Spyder driver to use it in Linux (yes, that injects proprietary code in ArgyllCMS). The file is CVSpyder.dll, which you can also pass as a argument to spyd2en, in case.

Afterwards, you can just plug your Spyder and use dispcal to start your monitor calibration. Now the main task is to figure out the command line options available and what they do

As a first test, I simply put:

sudo ./dispcal -v -y l ./test

I had to run dispcal as root otherwise it wouldn’t allow me to access the usb colorimeter – I guess changing the permissions of /dev/bus/usb/… would have been a more elegant solution…
-v is for verbose
-y l tells dispcal to calibrate an LCD monitor (-y c for CRT)
./test.cal is the output profile.

I was then asked what I wanted to do:
1) Black Level (CRT: Brightness)
2) White point (Color temperature, R,G,B, Gain)
3) White level (CRT: Contrast, LCD: Brightness)
4) Black Point (R,G,B, Offset
5) Check All
6) Continue on to calibration
7) Exit

Since this was just a test run (and this was not my photo monitor anyway), I hit 6.

The calibration took forever and a day to complete (measuring a gazillion of patches, averaging plenty of deltaE, checking candelas/m2 and iterating again and again – well 64 patches time 3 iterations). Much longer than in Windows.

This process spit out a test.cal file which was loaded via:

./dispwin ./test.cal

As far as I can see (this was just a quick first test run) the result is as good as can be – I tried loading a profile made under Windows and the Linux one; my display was very similar. OK this is not a scientific test (!!) but it tells me nothing is way off.

By the way, my colorimeter is a (primitive) Spyder 1, so both the Spyder 1 and 2 are supported.

That is for the good – Graeme Gill, you utterly rock!!

The ugly is that ColorVision is just releasing a Spyder 3 to the market and has been quite aggressively dismissing any idea of support towards OSS – as you can read in this long thread on the OpenICC mailing list. Which made Hal V. Engel say with wisdom:

The correct response to ColorVision not wanting anything to do with open source is to return the favor and have nothing to do with them.

So if you have a Spyder 1 or 2, support for Linux is (almost) here. If you are shopping for a (relatively cheap) colorimeter, check Huey

And with that, the last photography thing that I needed to do under MS-Windows is gone…