ArgyllCMS Display Calibration

Most photo and graphics people are probably familiar with DisplayCal as a monitor calibration tool. It's more thorough than the software that ships with Xrite devices, even if you're using one of their supported platforms like macOS or Windows. Unfortunately DisplayCal's GUI relies on Python 2 which is end-of-life and is being removed from a number of Linux distributions. Fortunately the GUI is just a front end for Argyll CMS and it is quite easy to calibrate a monitor with just Argyll installed. The command is as follows:

ArgllCMS Calibration

dispcal -d 1 -v -P 0.5,0.5,3.0 -o 9300_Internal_Display

The options are as follows:

-d 1: number of your display, if you have multiple displays this will be 1,2,3.. etc. Just running dispcal with no options will show what displays get what number. If you have just one display just do -d 1.

-v: verbose output

-P: screen posistion and scale, useful for HiDPI displays, options are X-position, Y-postion, scale. Here I have it in the middle of the screen (0.5,0.5) at 3.0X scale.

-o: Output file to save the profile to.

If you don't have a HiPDI, also called a retina display by Apple, the -P option might not be needed. I use it because without scaling the color square displaycal creates it is too small to cover the colorimeter. The software gives you the option to make some display adjustments before calibrating. If you're on a laptop or another display without RGB adjustments you can just press 7 to just straight to calibration and let dispcal do its thing.

Once the ICC profile is created you can import it into your desktop environment's color correction tool and apply it to the correct display.