Month: February 2010

Yesterday afternoon my community sponsored ColorMunki arrived. Within hours, I had fixed all the issues using it for display calibration:

Notice the device specific images? If you don’t get images you’ll be directed here and asked to submit images for other users. This just left projector support, which was also pretty easy to add:

So, then I moved onto calibrating printers. Normally people only want to profile the local printer, but I really want to profile the printer I use on a weekly basis: Snapfish. The idea of a print shop is you upload image files and in a few days time you get then back in the mail. Now GCM allows me to generate 7 photos worth of calibration squares and when I receive the photos I can generate the ICC profile so all subsequent photos are color compensated:

All the code is in git master, although the print shop feature is not quite finished yet. Yell if it breaks.

A few months ago, I started working on gnome-color-manager. Now, making a display profile using an external calibration device is as simple as a few clicks and a few minutes of waiting. Quite a few people are keen on me working on printer calibration next, and to properly support spectrophotometers. This means you could generate print profiles with a few clicks of the mouse, just like display profile.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a spectrophotometer, and without hardware it’s pretty hard to add support. The devices are also quite expensive, and not something I can expense with Red Hat (they are kind enough to allow me to work on gnome-color-manager in work time as it is!) Generously, the guys on the gnome-color-manager list have put together a collection. If we can get close to the £320 total, then I can buy a device of my own and add support to gnome-color-manager and work on the upstream CUPS support.

If you’re interested in us achieving this goal, and you’ve got a few quid spare, I would be very grateful. We’ve already got £145 towards the total. Any donations gratefully accepted. If we get close enough, I’ll bite the bullet and convince my wife I need to spend some money on “work stuff”. Thanks.

EDIT: total reached! Many thanks to you all!