Monitor calibration: the dispcalGUI way

Mramshaw mentioned dispcalGUI in a comment – while I was keeping an eye on lprof to offer a GUI for monitor calibration. So today I decided it was time to check how dispcalGUI does its job. And it does it well. Kudos to dispcalGUI’s author: Florian Höch

The idea

ArgyllCMS (blog 1, 2) is a Linux / Windows / Mac OS X set of command line utilities for color management – including but not limited to monitor calibration. So dispcalGUI is a make-your-life-easier frontend to Argyll which allows monitor calibration. This is especially handy since creating a profile with Argyll involves several steps with quite a few command line options – “dispcal -v -q l -y c samsung” anyone?

Firefox 3: color managed web browser coming near to you

This thread on Ubuntuforums made me think about color management aware browser. Until now, only Safari (on MacOS X and Windows) and Explorer (on MacOS X) were CM aware, but now with the close release of Firefox version 3, CM will become a standard on MacOS, Linux and Windows…

So let’s see what it means and how to use it.

Printing (5): when conversion gets tricky

Every now and again, you will come across an image that doesn’t easily converts from *RGB profile to your printer profile. It will degrade a lot no matter which conversion policy you use, it hurts your eyes on screen (when converted) and even more so when printed. And of course it is your favorite image or the one that you promised a printout to a friend.

So now how to fit a larger gamut into a smaller (print) one? That is normally the job of the Color Management Engine to ensure the best possible conversion from one gamut to another according to the conversion policy (perceptual or relative). But when the result of that operation is really poor, it may be worth to have a look at what is going on and see if there is a corrective action to take on the file before converting.

Printing (3): Printer Color Management

One of the most important step in photo printing is ensuring that what you see on the screen is what you will get on your prints. Given the cost of paper and ink, better make sure of that…

Now we already talked about the whole idea of a CMS (Color Management System) which should include all the steps of the photographic chain: scanner / camera, post-processing software, screen and printer. We know how to create a monitor ICC profile (even with a Spyder on Linux) and use this profile to make sure our color corrections are as “objective” as possible.

If screen calibration is important, printer calibration is crucial: it probably is the single step that gave me the most important boost in ease of use and satisfaction in post-processing.

Use ColorVision Spyder to produce an ICC monitor profile under ArgyllCMS / Linux

OK, I was very enthusiastic in my last entry to see my Spyder calibration device supported in ArgyllCMS. So much that I didn’t read any documentation and just typed the first command that I came across and behold, my Spyder started measuring patches. Great!

However, typing the first command I came across didn’t quite produce a working icc profile. So this post is valid for compiling and setting up ArgyllCMS with Spyder support, but not for using it. Read on.

I had a bit more of a careful browse through ArgyllCMS documentation. Now I start to understand why people say Color Management is difficult. The el cheapo software that I got with my Spyder is just measuring few color patches from the monitor and spits out an icc profile.

No so with Argyll. You can read through the “monitor profiling usage scenario” to get idea about how to go about it.

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:

Using Windows made monitor profiles in Linux?

In a previous entry, I recommend to use a Windows made monitor profile under Linux if the monitor profiler is not supported in Linux (which is the case for most cheap ones, yet). Today, I stumbled upon this blog entry from Nicolas Vilars who did the following test:

• Making a profile under Windows
• Loading it and testing results for a few color patches
• Loading the same profile under Linux (with xcalib)
• Testing the same patches with sticking the (Windows plugged) colorimeter on the Linux screen
• Comparing the results

All in all the result are very good – most of the differences are less than what a human eye can detect. Check his blog for the details.

Spyder support in Linux – good things cooking?

I was just hanging around on the internet (as you would do on a foggy Saturday morning) when I came across an interesting news. Yan-Ke had started a blog to reverse-engineer the Spyder colorimeter, but the blog hadn’t been active for a while (so I didn’t mention it when talking about the Spyder).

Now there was a recent entry in that blog stating that Graeme Gill (the Color Management Guru behind Argyll CMS, you should all know his name by now) has been working on integrating a Spyder2 driver in Argyll CMS – see this thread in Argyll Mailing list.

Poor man’s screen calibration

I knew I forgot something…

The whole thingie about monitor calibration was based on using a hardware tool (Spyder from Colorvision, in my case) to generate a Monitor ICC profile. A measurement tool is necessary since our eyes, though very good at seeing differences in direct comparison, are not so good in “absolute terms measurement” (what we are interested in here).

Color Management – bits and pieces

Hi there,

I think we covered most of the useful stuff for monitor calibration. This is a great first step. However, there are a couple of things I want to mention at that stage, which I a) forgot to mention earlier b) didn’t really fit anywhere.