Argyll Color Management System
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Argyll Color Management System  Home Page

(Including icclib, cgatslib and DPS)

Author :- Graeme Gill (Home Page)
Last updated 2024/9/27



ArgyllPRO ColorMeter

ArgyllPRO ColorMeter logo

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.

Contribution Level

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.)