Author :- Graeme Gill (Home Page)
Last updated 2025/12/3
Introducing the ArgyllPRO ColorMeter V2.0
ArgyllPRO ColorMeter is an Android application for Tablets and Phones,
that lets you use all your USB connected color measurement instruments
on the go, as well as save them for use later. If you need to measure
& record light or color in Printing, Photography, Lighting, Graphic
Design, TV, Film or Video, then you will want to check it out in the2 Minute Overview + Guided
Tour Video.
For complete details, please see the ArgyllPRO
website.
ArgyllCMS
Current Version 3.4.1 (22nd August 2025)
ArgyllCMS is an ICC compatible color management system, available as
Open Source. It supports accurate ICC profile creation for scanners,
cameras and film recorders, and calibration and profiling of displays and
RGB & CMYK printers. Device Link can be created with a wide variety of
advanced options, including specialized Video calibration standards
and 3dLuts. Spectral sample data is supported, allowing a selection of
illuminants observer types, and paper fluorescent whitener additive
compensation. Profiles can also incorporate source specific gamut mappings
for perceptual and saturation intents. Gamut mapping and profile linking
uses the CIECAM02 appearance model, a unique gamut mapping algorithm, and
a wide selection of rendering intents. It also includes code for the
fastest portable 8 bit raster color conversion engine available anywhere,
as well as support for fast, fully accurate 16 bit conversion. Device
color gamuts can also be viewed and compared with a modern Web browser
using X3DOM . Comprehensive documentation is provided for each major tool,
and a general guide to using the tools for typical color management tasks
is also available. A mailing list provides support for more advanced
usage.
Argyll is a collection of source code that compiles into a set of command
line tools, licensed under an AGPL license.
Argyll also includes a general purpose ICC V2 profile format access
library, icclib, and a general purpose CGATS file format I/O library.
Your continued support is important.
Unfortunately programmers and color experts can't live on encouragement and
complements alone - they have bills to pay, equipment to keep up to date,
instruments to buy, and other financial obligations such as maintaining a
roof over their heads and keeping the lights on, just like normal people.
Currently it is only your support that will allow me to continue working on
ArgyllCMS, rather than having to do something else. So if you find ArgyllCMS
valuable, and would like to continue to have technical support, bug-fixes,
updates and drivers for new instruments, and support for new technologies,
or you appreciate having serious color management available on platforms
other than MSWin and OS X, then it's a really good idea to provide some
support via a donation that reflects the value it has to you.
If you are a casual or hobby user, then something like $5 - $100 may be
appropriate, depending on how deep your pockets are.
If you are using ArgyllCMS in your business, an annual donation, of (say)
5-20% of the cost of the commercial software you have not had to pay for,
would make a great deal of difference in ensuring that it continues to be
available.
If you are distributing ArgyllCMS as part of some other free package, then
please make your users aware of the need to support the software that you
and they depend upon.
If you are distributing ArgyllCMS as part of some other package that you are
make money out of (e.g., a commercial Linux distribution where ArgyllCMS is
providing a feature that allows Linux to be on par with other operating
systems with regard to Color Management), then it would help tremendously if
you treated it like other key software you depend on, and make an allowance
to contribute a portion of a full time developers salary every year.
No contribution is too small - it all adds up.
If there is an insufficient level of ongoing support, then there is still a
very real possibility that you will return here in 6-12 months time, and
find ArgyllCMS has gone.
NOTE that if you don't wish to be publicly acknowledged,
please say so in the Paypal message attached to the payment.
Special thanks to the following
people who have made significant or regular contributions:
Richard Boutwell Photography, Lateral Imaging, Fabio Giraldi, You're Perfect
LLC, novo Group, Inc., Digital Domain, Patrick Timothy McMahon, Ingo
Rudorff, John Wheeler, Daniel Castonguay, Alexandros Sarris, Water Curtain
Cave, Scott McGieson, R Cromberge, Roy Jones, Sushant
Gore
Many thanks also to Florian
H�ch for making ArgyllCMS more accessible via DisplayCAL,
and contributing half the donations to DiscalCAL to help support ArgyllCMS!
After you have downloaded the source or executables, please read the notes
on installing.
Please note that some of the Linux packages based on
"ArgyllCMS" have been modified in various ways, and may not work exactly the
same as what is distributed here. If something doesn't work using such a
package, please download the unmodified software from here and re-test
before reporting a bug.
Getting Support for ArgyllCMS or reporting
Bugs:
The best way of getting support in using ArgyllCMS or reporting bugs, is via
the ArgyllCMS mailing List, where you will
get the benefit of other knowledgeable people being able to help you.
You can also email me (Graeme Gill) directly. (See Contact Me
below).
Please note that color measurement
instruments are being driven by ArgyllCMS drivers, and that any problems
or queries regarding instrument
operation should be directed to
the Argyll's author(s) or the Argyll mailing list, and not to anyother party.
I do scan some of the relevant web forums sporadically, and others on those
forums may be able to help:
For Video and TV calibration and Profiling, the AVS
Forums.
For Film & Video color grading display calibration, Lift
Gamma Gain is worth a look.
For Camera, Photography, Photo Printing and Display profiling, try Luminous
Landscapes.
[ I recommend you Stay away from
DPReview - their heavy commercial censorship makes it unsuitable for
support or discussion. ]
For printing and practical color management, the Apple
ColorSync List is worth looking at (many experts hang out there),
while Forums like Printer
Knowledge may be better suited to those at a more hobby level.
pacsDisplay - open source software
for generating and installing DICOM grayscale LUTS, and for performing QC
on calibrated displays.
Display color management and Wayland:
In the Linux world, there has been a move to replace the X11 graphical user
interface system with Wayland.
Unfortunately Wayland was developed with little or no consideration for
support of color management. In fact it appears that some of the
fundamental assumptions made in Waylands development blindly ignore the
realities of the display device dependence of color.
Starting in 2013 and continuing in 2016-2017 I attempted to engage the
Wayland developers in discussing the challenges of adding proper support for
display color management under Wayland, but in general received (and
continue to receive) a hostile response. NIH
seems very strong, and there was little respect shown for the importance of
color management or the wider experience of implementing it within other
graphical environments such as X11, MSWindows and OS X. While there are
certainly some in the Wayland developer community that are actively working
on aspects related to color management, driven primarily by the reality of
HDR displays, it doesn't currently appear to me that there is much progress
in addressing the wider and deeper challenge of fully supporting modern
color management and its tools and applications.The most pertinent progress
appears to be in the addition of some backwards compatibility via XWayland,
at least for a single display. This currently seems to fall short of support
for per-channel calibration curves though.
As a consequence there is little immediate prospect of ArgyllCMS being
able to natively support display calibration and profiling for Wayland.
Even if some color management related support is added to Wayland, there
is the very real prospect that it is unsuitable for use by actual color
management tools such as ArgyllCMS, since there is no consultation between
Wayland developers and the author(s) of ArgyllCMS.
So my current advice for people wanting to use a color managed display on
Linux is to stick to X11. If that becomes impractical, then, regrettably
the only sure path forward is to switch to one of the two commercial
operating systems that do support color management.
For what it's worth, here are a couple of documents I created to
assist Wayland developers in understanding the requirements that color
management has, and a possible path to satisfying those requirements
within the limitations of Waylands approach to desktop graphics:
GUI graphic system
Color Management Requirements
This document details some of the requirements for supporting a modern
color management system for desktop display. It explains each requirement
and explains why it is needed. The current state of support for MSWindows,
OS X and X11 is shown.
Sketch of a set
of Wayland Color Management protocols
This document sketches out a set of Wayland protocol extensions aimed at
satisfying the requirements laid out in the above document. While
incomplete, it shows a potential path towards modern color management,
while dealing with the legacy of a graphical system that wasn't designed
with color management in mind.
I'm not sure anyone other than myself will find this useful, but here is a true 4x19 MSWin Bitmap font - good for medium
resolution displays where smaller anti-aliased TrueType fonts don't look so
good (partly due to anti-aliasing being done in a gamma encoded space rather
than linear light ?). Started with Bm437_Verite_9x14.FON, but like most 9x14
bitmap fonts this is just an 8x12 plonked in a 9x14 grid. So inspired by the
look of the MSWindows Terminal 8x12 font that I got used to with an older
display, I modified the Verite 9x14 into a true 9x14 bitmap font. Can be
used in the MSWindows Command Prompt type windows. (A combination of
FontForge and D.W.Emmett's Softy were used to modify the font.)
