Properly calibrating color in Linux?

[Rob Williams]

Hey guys,

I am interested in calibrating the color on my monitor properly, so that when I view photography it will be more accurate. However... all of the products available, such as Pantone Huey and the Spider require Windows for calibration.

Does anyone here know if those programs -require- that software to calibrate after the initial step, or does the program generally just get you to calibrate the color via the monitor controls?

I am primarily interested in being able to go into Windows for the initial calibration, but then boot back into Linux and have the same color.

Seems complicated, and it may be way more of a pain than I feel like. I could just use it on my second PC which runs Windows, but meh, that's not the preferred method

Thanks for any help/ideas.

[Michael]

Rob,

Are you looking for a program like xcalib? http://www.etg.e-technik.uni-erlange...eb/doe/xcalib/

[Rob Williams]

Michael,

Thanks a lot for the link. Sadly, I cannot seem to get that program to even run. Downloaded the binary and the source and same problem.

Regardless, what I am looking for primarily is to have true accurate color. The Spider for instance, measures the color on your monitor and you can alter settings to make sure everything is correct. I just am not sure if the settings apply to only Windows or not.

I guess I could look into it further, but the Spider website has been down all day it seems.

[drag]

You do the same thing that they do when they make movies:

You eyeball it. That's all. There are tools to help you. Set the monitor to color tempurature to 6500K then get the gamma at the proper settings.

For setting up ICC profiles for applications you can probably be reasonably assured that the color is going to be the same in Windows and Linux if your using propriatory Nvidia drivers (since at the core they are the same between Linux and Windows), but otherwise it may or may not work.

For other items such as printers and scanners you can probably get away with using some default icc profiles, but there are differences in how Linux and Windows interacts with them which may change the color. Also color changes over time as the items get older, so it's worth it to generate your own profiles sometimes.

Check out LPROF for this. http://lprof.sourceforge.net/

Looks like ArgyllCMS recently added support for some hardware monitor calibration devices, which is great news. Previously you realy had to just eyeball it.

http://www.behrmann.name/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=59&Itemid=1&lang=en

You may want to ask these guys for more details though...

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01901.html

That's the littlecms maintainer stuff. It's the stuff that is commonly used in Linux apps that support color management (from what I understand, even though my understanding is limited)

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_color_management

Color management in Linux is relatively immature. There is a freedesktop.org working group for it that has some information you can find it at:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/OpenIcc

[Rob Williams]

Thanks a lot Drag, will read into those links soon. That's a huge help