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Linux Color Calibration?

Posted by Cliff on from the hue-red-light-green-saturation-blue dept.

eweaver asks: "Windows has built-in color matching modules like ICM and sRBG, and 3rd-party solutions like Colorific and ColorBlind, but what is the Linux/XFree86 equivalent? Caldera Graphics seems to have some sort of solution, but I don't think it's universal, it seems to work only in their programs. What can I do so that the colors I see in all my Linux graphics apps (mainly GIMP and Blender) are accurate (adjusted for gamma, white point, lighting, etc.)?"

2 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Some info by raph · · Score: 5

    A fair amount of info on color management tools is on my color management page. One of the most exciting pieces of technology is the Argyll color management system.

    The main thing that's lacking right now is integration. A lot of the pieces exist, but they're tied together yet. I plan on integrating Argyll into Ghostscript over the next few months, so that's likely to be a good start.

    Interestingly enough, X had a very good start at a color management system (XCMS). However, as far as I know, nobody ever used this seriously, so it's yet another hunk of worthless junk hanging off the X server. This type of thing still "works", though:

    xterm -fg CIEXYZ:0.371298/0.201443/0.059418

    Of course, the chance of your monitor actually matching the CIE color is pretty close to nil.

    In any case, there's quite a bit of work underway, and it's reasonable to expect that Linux will eventually have good color management. If you want it sooner rather than later, contribute to one of the projects!

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    LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs

  2. Actually X can do it all! by Wills · · Score: 5

    As I posted below, the whole point of the color calibration stuff in X is it can handle color in a device-independent way by using CCCs (Color Conversion Contexts) to specify a display's color pecularities. Do your own monitor color calibration and simply load the calibration data onto your Xserver using xcmsdb. Once you've done that your example of specifying a device-independent foreground color in xterm using the CIE XYZ color space would give a properly calibrated color on your monitor. That's pretty useful. Your criticism of color management in X is inaccurate and misleading because you don't understand how to use it properly.

    As a footnote, doing an accurate color calibration of a monitor, requires expensive test equipment like a tele-spectrophotometer.

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    Scroogle