Calibrate and characterize your display devices using one of many supported measurement instruments, with support for multi-display setups and a variety of available options for advanced users, such as verification and reporting functionality to evaluate ICC profiles and display devices, creating video 3D LUTs, as well as optional CIECAM02 gamut mapping to take into account varying viewing conditions.

At its core it relies on ArgyllCMS, an advanced open source color management system, to take measurements, create calibrations and profiles, and for a variety of other advanced color related tasks.

Other features include:

  • Support of colorimeter corrections for different display device types to increase the absolute accuracy of colorimeters. Corrections can be imported from vendor software or created from measurements if a spectrometer is available.
  • Check display device uniformity via measurements.
  • Test chart editor: Create charts with any amount and composition of color patches, easy copy & paste from CGATS, CSV files (only tab-delimited) and spreadsheet applications, for profile verification and evaluation.
  • Create synthetic ICC profiles with custom primaries, white- and blackpoint as well as tone response for use as working spaces or source profiles in device linking (3D LUT) transforms.

DisplayCAL is developed and maintained by Florian Höch, and would not be possible without ArgyllCMS, which is developed and maintained by Graeme W. Gill.

System requirements and other prerequisites

General system requirements

  • A recent Linux, macOS (10.6 or newer, recommended 10.7 or newer) or Windows (recommended Windows 7 or newer) operating system.
  • "True color" 24 bits per pixel or higher graphics output.

Hardware requirements

  • Minimum: 1 GHz single core processor, 1.5 GB RAM, 500 MB free storage space.
  • Recommended: 2 GHz dual core processor or better, 4 GB RAM or more, 1 GB free storage space or more.

ArgyllCMS

  • To use DisplayCAL, you need to download and install ArgyllCMS (1.0 or newer).

Supported instruments

You need one of the supported instruments to make measurements. All instruments supported by ArgyllCMS are also supported by DisplayCAL. For display readings, these currently are:

Colorimeters

  • CalMAN X2 (treated as i1 Display 2)
  • Datacolor/ColorVision Spyder2
  • Datacolor Spyder3 (since ArgyllCMS 1.1.0)
  • Datacolor Spyder4 (since ArgyllCMS 1.3.6)
  • Datacolor Spyder5 (since ArgyllCMS 1.7.0)
  • Datacolor SpyderX (since ArgyllCMS 2.1.0)
  • Hughski ColorHug (Linux support since ArgyllCMS 1.3.6, Windows support with newest ColorHug firmware since ArgyllCMS 1.5.0, fully functional Mac OS X support since ArgyllCMS 1.6.2)
  • Hughski ColorHug2 (since ArgyllCMS 1.7.0)
  • Image Engineering EX1 (since ArgyllCMS 1.8.0)
  • Klein K10-A (since ArgyllCMS 1.7.0. The K-1, K-8 and K-10 are also reported to work)
  • Lacie Blue Eye (treated as i1 Display 2)
  • Sencore ColorPro III, IV & V (treated as i1 Display 1)
  • Sequel Imaging MonacoOPTIX/Chroma 4 (treated as i1 Display 1)
  • X-Rite Chroma 5 (treated as i1 Display 1)
  • X-Rite ColorMunki Create (treated as i1 Display 2)
  • X-Rite ColorMunki Smile (since ArgyllCMS 1.5.0)
  • X-Rite DTP92
  • X-Rite DTP94
  • X-Rite/GretagMacbeth/Pantone Huey
  • X-Rite/GretagMacbeth i1 Display 1
  • X-Rite/GretagMacbeth i1 Display 2/LT (the HP DreamColor/Advanced Profiling Solution versions of the instrument are also reported to work)
  • X-Rite i1 Display Pro, ColorMunki Display (since ArgyllCMS 1.3.4. The HP DreamColor, NEC SpectraSensor Pro and SpectraCal C6 versions of the instrument are also reported to work)

Spectrometers

  • JETI specbos 1211/1201 (since ArgyllCMS 1.6.0)
  • JETI spectraval 1511/1501 (since ArgyllCMS 1.9.0)
  • X-Rite ColorMunki Design/Photo (since ArgyllCMS 1.1.0)
  • X-Rite/GretagMacbeth i1 Monitor (since ArgyllCMS 1.0.3)
  • X-Rite/GretagMacbeth i1 Pro (the EFI ES-1000 version of the instrument is also reported to work)
  • X-Rite i1 Pro 2 (since ArgyllCMS 1.5.0)
  • X-Rite/GretagMacbeth Spectrolino
  • X-Rite i1Studio (since ArgyllCMS 2.0)