Monitor profiling / calibration on Linux

If you’ve spent any time manipulating / scanning / printing photos you’ll know that getting the colours on screen to match those of the original slide / negative and / or those of the final print is rather non-trivial. Welcome to the special 10th circle of hell that is device colour management. Fortunately there are ways out of this purgatory, in particular for monitors I’m talking about colourimeters; Unfortunately nearly all of these hardware devices require use of Windows or Mac OS-X.

After an extensive Googling session I eventually discovered that a gadget called the Monaco Optix XR is the branded name for the DTP-94 device. This device is in turn the only low cast (ie < $1000) hardware currently supported by Argyll CMS (a set of open source programs for doing colour management including display calibration & profiling).
The bad news is that the company making the Monaco Optix was acquired by x-rite whom (oblivious to this device’s unique selling point for Linux users) have apparantly discontinued its production :-( There’s still various photo stores which have them in stock, so I picked one up from Midwest Photo Exchange. On a more promising note though, I’ve also just read in the Argyll CMS lists that the current development snapshot releases have support for a couple of the Eye-One devices. So perhaps all is not lost of Linux users in the future after all!

Now that I’ve got this device its time to figure out how on earth the Argyll CMS software is actually supposed to be used. There is alot of documentation, but it is far from clear what the best process to go through is. In particular while it can be used with LCDs, the docs are not too good at describing which things need to be done differently for LCDs vs CRTs. Oh well, I’ll figure it out in the end. Getting the monitor setup correctly is also only one of the problems. I still use film for all my photography, scanning it in with a Nikon CoolScan. This needs profiling/calibrating too, so I’ve a set of IT 8.7 scanner calibration targets on order from a cheap source in Germany.