Monitors can be calibrated to display the “correct” colors by using a calibration device, complemented by the vendor software. I decided to buy the Spyder2Express since it had good reviews and a reasonable price. Unfortunately, there is no color calibration device that is supported on Linux by its vendor and I currently use Linux (openSuse) as my main operative system. I could use my work laptop running windows to calibrate the monitor, then export the color profile and import it in Linux. There is an article here on how to do it. With help from one of the comments in that article, I found about Argyll Color Management System. Argyll is a monitor calibration software package for Linux that supports most of the existing calibration devices. It uses the Windows binary software to create a Linux binary in order to be able to communicate with the device to run the calibration tests and create a color profile. It also provides an utility to apply the color profile to your monitor.

The steps to calibrate your monitor in Linux using Argyll are pretty simple. In my case, using the Syper2Express device, all I had to do was runt the following commands(as root, or give the user permission to communicate with the usb device):

$ cd Argyll_V1.0.3/
$ ./spyd2en -v /media/ColorVision/setup/setup.exe (creates binary file to communicate with device)
$ ./dispcal -v -y l -o MyMonitor (runs calibration tests and creates monitor color profile)
$  ./dispwin MyMonitor.icc (applies color profile to monitor)

The generated color profile can also be imported to your post processing software like GIMP in order to use the monitor color profile instead of using a more common profile like sRGB or Adobe RGB.

This feature was developed by Pedro Alonso as one of GIMP’s projects for Google Summer of Code, and you can find some video tutorials and examples on his website. I gave it a try, and the result was this:

Very neat tool indeed!