Argyll Color Management System
Home Page
(Including icclib, cgatslib and DPS)
Author :- Graeme Gill (Home
Page)
Last updated 2024/9/27
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 the
2 Minute Overview + Guided
Tour Video.
For complete details, please see the
ArgyllPRO
website.
ArgyllCMS
Current Version 3.3.0 (27th September 2024)
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.
Thanks to everyone who has made the effort to
provide financial support, as well as the encouraging messages - you
are making a difference in keeping ArgyllCMS available:
Jiabei Zhu, Magnus Pires, Christian
Lang, Felipe Vidal, Kenny
Lasse, Thomas Gravdahl, Tim Storm, Peng Zhan Lu, Dominik
Rutschmann, Jacques Bratieres, Kostas Oikonomou, Martin
Coetzee, Peter Jones, Paul Frocchi, Mark MacKenzie, John
Rollins, Katrina Niolet, Robert Moerland, Mark MacKenzie,
Paul Stein, Valneides Araujo da Costa, Ryan
Mack
Special thanks to the
following people who have made significant or regular contributions:
Richard Boutwell Photography, Lateral Imaging, Fabio
Giraldi, You're Perfect LLC, Katrina Niolet, Richard
Boutwell Photography, Roy Jones
Many thanks also to Florian Höch for making
ArgyllCMS more accessible via DisplayCAL,
and contributing half the donations to DiscalCAL to help support
ArgyllCMS!
Downloads:
On Line Documentation
Download V3.3.0 Argyll Source Code
Download V3.3.0 Main Microsoft Windows
executables
Download V3.3.0 Main Apple OS X
executables
Download V3.3.0 Main Linux x86
Executables
Commercial Use and non-GPL Licensing
Download V2.16 icclib or cgatslib Source
Code
Download DPS Source Code
ArgyllCMS mailing List Information
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 any other
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.
Other software that uses ArgyllCMS:
DisplayCAL by Florian Höch
The
Little Argyll GUI and A
Color-Managed Linux Workflow by Russell Cottrell
CoCa by Andrew Stawowczyk Long
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 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 very 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 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.
As a consequence there is little prospect of ArgyllCMS being
able to support display calibration and profiling for Wayland.
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.
Articles:
SwatchMate Cube, Part 1 - Out of
the box accuracy
SwatchMate Cube, Part 2 - Can it
be improved ?
Modifying the i1i0 table for the
i1pro2
Miscellany:
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.)