Where display profiles are stored, and how to load them
automatically.
Installing a display profile for your monitor is very operating system
dependent, which is why dispin -I is a
good way of taking care of all these details. On some systems it is not
the operating system itself that
supports display profiles, but individual applications, or helper
programs.
Please choose from the detailed instructions below that suite your
system:
Microsoft
Windows
Apple OS X
Linux/UNIX X11
On Microsoft Windows, display
profiles are typically in one of the
following directories:
MS Windows Me and 98: C:\Windows\System\Color
MS Windows NT:
C:\Winnt\system32\spool\drivers\color
MS Window 2000, XP and Vista:
C:\Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color
An alternative to using dispwin -I
to install your display profiles,
is to use the Display
Property dialog, advanced settings, Color management tab, and locate
the profile and install it there. This in
itself does not cause the profile to be made use of anywhere in your
system.
If you are using Adobe Photoshop on your system, then you can tell
it to use your monitor profile by editing the appropriate registry key,
typically "My
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Color\Monitor\Monitor0", to
contain the name of the display profile, and then restart Photoshop
This is the simplest way of ensuring that the Adobe calibration loader
utility Adobe Gamma loads the video hardware lookup tables from the
vcgt tag, and
uses the profile as its display profile.
The adobe gamma utility can be told to use your profile, but the
procedure is slightly tricky: Open adobe gamma from photoshop (in the
Help->Color Management... menu item), select "Open Adobe Gamma", and
select the "Load.." button. Select your profile and "Open". Select "OK"
in the Adobe Gamma, it will then ask you to save it's modified version
of your profile under a different name. Chose a name for the modified
profile, and save it. Exit from Photoshop. Copy the profile you want to
use, over the modified profile that you saved in Adobe Gamma. (If you
don't do the last step, the profile Photoshop will be using will have
been modified in strange ways from what you intended.)
Installing a profile on Microsoft Windows generally doesn't mean
that the profiles calibration will be automatically loaded into a
display on startup. A separated utility is usually needed to achiev
this.
Some Microsoft Windows applications may come with
"Gamma/VCGT/RAMDAC/Video LUT"
loader utilities, consult their documentation and check your Start Menu
Startup folders. If you don't want to use any of these 3rd party
utilities, you can also use the dispwin
utility to do this for you, as it takes either a .cal or ICC file
as an argument. The xcalib
utility could also be used.
To add a startup item that will load a profiles calibration into the
display using dispwin, use the
following
instructions:
On the task bar, right click and select
"Properties", then select the "Advanced" tab, then click "Add..". then
browse till you locate dispwin.exe. In the box containing the path to
dispwin.exe, add a space then
the option -L, eg:
c:\bin\argyll\dispwin -L
If you don't want to use the default
installed profile, you could explicitly set the calibration file to use
as an argument:
c:\bin\argyll\dispwin
c:\myprofiles\mydisplay.icm
Click "Next >", select the "Startup"
folder, then name the item (ie.
"Argyll Calibration Loader"), then press "Finish".
You can test it out by simply navigating the "Start" menu to the
"Startup" folder and selecting the item you've just created. If you
want to alter any of the details, navigate to the item again and right
click it, and select "Properties". More than one startup item can be
created to set the calibration for more than one display. You may want
to cut and paste the "Target" line to a normal Command Prompt shell to
check that it works as expected, as it is impossible to catch error
messages in the startup.
Microsoft Windows XP has an
optional Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet for Windows XP
available for
download from
Microsoft, which handles installation and registering of the a display
profile, and will also automatically set the display calibration on
system startup. The applet is started from the control panel, and first
you have to "Install..." the profile in the Profiles tab, then associate it with
the display in the Devices
tab, but NOTE that it seems to
have a bug, in that it
sometimes associates the profiles with the wrong monitor entry!
On
Microsoft Vista you can set
the display profile in
Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound
-> Color Management, as an alternative to dispwin -I. In Devices
you select "Use my settings for this
device", and then add the profile you've created.
Unfortunately though, it doesn't use the 'vcgt'
calibration curves on system startup, so a utility such as dispwin will still have to be used
to do this. Note that currently Vista also has a bug that causes the calibration
curves to be reset whenever the User Account Dialog (and similar) is
displayed. This problem can only be worked around manually, by
re-running the startup item whenever this happens. Note that due to the
details of this bug it is necessary to actually reset the calibration
to something else before re-setting it. This can be done quite
conveniently in dispwin by adding the -c
flag: e.g.: c:\bin\argyll\dispwin -c
-L
On Apple OSX, the display
profile are in one of the following
locations:
/Network/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
/System/Library/Colorsync/Profiles
/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
~/Library/ColorSync/Profiles
Note though that /System/Library/Colorsync/Profiles is only for
profiles supplied by Apple. You can use dispwin
-S to select the appropriate scope when installing a profile
using dispwin -I. You can use the "System
Preferences->Displays->Color" utility to check that the profile
has been installed correctly. Note that the contents of
the description tag (the argument to the -D
flag used with the colprof
utility) will be used to identify the profile.
On Linux and other Unix style systems, there is no
universally agreed location for ICC profiles yet,
although the following locations have been suggested at various times:
/usr/share/color/icc
/usr/local/share/color/icc
~/.color/icc
although particular applications may use their own locations, such as:
/usr/local/share/Scribus/profiles
Argyll dispwin follows uses the ucmm scheme for storing user and system display
profiles, and when a display is set to use a profile correctly, it will
follow this
convention to make it available to applications.
If you want the display calibration to be loaded, you should consider
installing a utility to do so at startup, such as dispwin
or xcalib.
Using dispwin the currently installed
profile for a particular display can be loaded using the -L option of dispwin:
dispwin -L
which will both upload the installed profile into the root
window _ICC_PROFILE property, and also load it into the display
VideoLUTs.
You can use the dispwin -d parameter in
the usual way to select other
displays to store or load the calibration using the _ICC_PROFILE
property.
To do this when you start your X11 server, you could put the above
command in your .xinitrc file
in your home directory for each screen.