[Application] Color Sustainer - ICC Profile Enforcer

Seems like a good idea to add command line argument support to Color Sustainer to allow loading profiles in the mode the display is set at.

 

Sup guise!

I am a new user, and I am unable to associate display modes with any ICC profiles I have created.

The ICC profiles I have created are simply those made with Windows 8.1 display color calibration. I load the file, click "associate," and the text just turns red. If necessary, I can upload one, but I'm assuming y'all bros are already familiar with that file format and its possible limitations.

For context - all I want to do is permanently adjust the awful red hue that my cheap laptop shipped with. I can get rid of it using Windows color calibration tool, but it comes back the moment I launch a game or do anything else. I tried another app called CPK, but it doesn't seem to do anything.

 

Hey there!

A recent post had been made concerning a similar issue by the user VultureX. The profiles Windows produces lack a VCGT (Video Card Gamma Table). That tag contains the information that is loaded into the graphics card in order for software-based display calibration to be possible system-wide. Therefore, any applications that are made to load profiles into the graphics card do rely on that tag and thus any profiles that do not contain this tag cannot be loaded. Color Sustainer, CPK, dispwin, etc... all rely on this VCGT tag being present. However, Color Sustainer and dispwin report when a profile is unsupported while CPK do not. This is why you are under the impression that CPK is not working. CPK would work on profiles that contain the VCGT tag but CPK has other issues / limitation that led me to develop Color Sustainer in the first place.

It's late at night in here. So, what I'm going to do is ask a favor of you and promise you one in return: Software such as PowerStrip can capture loaded gamma ramps (the applied calibration) in order to use them with a Hotkey. If you could find the color profiles that PowerStrip stores (IF it does indeed store them as parse-able profiles), or find any other application that can capture the system gamma ramp and save it into such a profile, link me here so I can recommend it to others for that very purpose.

If in the next day or two you do not find such a tool, I'll roll out a quick update to Color Sustainer that supports capturing gamma ramps into files that can be loaded into Color Sustainer.

You might find that other tools that adjust colors, such as QuickGamma, might be immediately useful as they produce profiles that contain VCGT tags and thus work with Color Sustainer right away.

Do keep us updated!

 

Thanks dude

Based on your explanation, I tried capturing my calibration with CPK (as opposed to loading the ICC file from Windows' calibration tool), and now it works! Of note to anyone who attempts this route, it's more clicks than would be intuitive; after capturing the gamma ramp and saving it, you have to then browse to the file you saved and load it. A limitation of this approach is that it saves the capture with its own idiosyncratic extension (not ICC).

I tried Powerstrip as well, but, due either to deficiencies in the program or deficiencies in my intellect, I couldn't get it to control my monitor's colors at all, even when I just grabbed the sliders and dragged them to the extreme.

 

That's great. However, the profile captured by CPK can only be read by CPK. Were you able to somehow load the saved profile into Color Sustainer?

 

Do you want to save it directly into a .icc profile under the "vcgt" tag? If so, then I do not know of any that can do that directly in one step.

But you can capture the current LUT to a .txt file with Xrite Calibration LUT tester.

Another tool is dispwin.exe -s [filename] saves the currently loaded LUT to a text file.

These two are the best because they keep it as 16-bit.

For 8-bit capture you can use Monitor Calibration Wizard, inside the installation folder are the LUT's.

Then once you have extracted the LUT data, you can use a tool called ICCxml to convert ICC to XML, then you can paste the data into the VCGT tag, then convert it back to ICC.

 

a lot of full screen games still skips icc profiles, is this normal right?

 

Yes. Check the sister thread here for the reasons.

Thead should be stickied. Will notify the mods.

 

is there a way to port icc color setting to sweet fx?

 

Is there any way of capturing or re-creating a profile which Color Sustainer will interpret? I've tried the profiles created by Windows (8.1), QuickMonitorProfile, and the CaptureGammaRamp program linked in this thread - but all of them fail and show up as red. I've double checked that some other .icm files work (such as the ones in the yamakasi-catleap-monitor-club thread), but sadly they're way off for the calibration I need.

 

CaptureGammaRamp is obsolete as it creates ICC profiles that do not follow the ICC specification. Older versions of Color Sustainer could read profiles generated by CaptureGammaRamp since I had them work together but now that Color Sustainer reads ICC profiles in the correct format, it cannot read such profiles. PowerStrip should do the job, as it has a capture option.

I'm currently working on the next version of Color Sustainer and it will include this option to make everyone's lives easier, so stay tuned.

Tell me how it goes.

 

Got a ROG Swift and sadly the stock calibration is messed up so I have to calibrate it via software.

Does the nvidia desktop color settings cancel any ICC profile set in windows? From my experiments I think that only 1 is active at a time (you either use an ICC or modify nvidia settings). Can you confirm please yasamoka?

If what I said above is true, is there any advantage of using ICC over nvidia settings?

I apologize if this is off-topic but you probably know the answer

Thanks

 

Hello there!

Nothing is off-topic, this is a forum topic concerning anything to do with color profiles.

I will ask a friend with an Nvidia card to try that out seeing as I don't have Nvidia at the moment. But yes, probably one is active at a time, with the exception of Digital Vibrance which effects cannot be captured into a color profile. I'll make sure and let you know.

ICCs have much finer control than any settings that have to do with sliders. You get to map every one of 256 points on each of the R,G,B curves to another value. This helps fix issues that may be present in one part of the curve but not in another, e.g. low gamma near white, spikes, uneven RGB response closer to black. I'll show examples when I'm back home. Some monitors are scary in the way they present their grayscale over the whole range.

Concerning the ROG Swift, try a few color profiles out there. Try out the ones made by colorimeters, though, not user-defined profiles. Then, if they're not to your liking (and by liking I mean their monitors are somewhat different than yours), then tweak their profiles using QuickGamma. I believe this is the way to get closest to accuracy without having to borrow / invest in a colorimeter (which I always recommend, it's a valuable device to always have around). Remember, you have an $800 screen, pays to spend some more to ensure that that screen and all other screens around the house are at their peak performance.

 

Oddly enough I'm trying to calibrate a ROG Swift also - if it helps at all Lenix I have my monitor doing the color adjustments, and then just need to adjust the gamma though a profile. Monitor colors (Color Temp. -> User Mode) are R93, G87, B100.

Yasamosa - Powerstrip seems set up to adjust my monitor to how I would like it - how would I go about getting the profile it creates? I can't find an export button anywhere.

Thanks for the hard work and the support!

 

@yasamoka, thanks for the helpful information. I've tried to modify an ICC profile with QuickGamma but there is something confusing me, I only want to lower the gamma without touching the colors, if I open quickgamma, press + and then - (bringing back the gamma to original value) and save the profile, in theory both of the old profile and the new quickgamma profile should be 100% the same, but that's not the case, the profile that quickgamma generates have different colors from the original base profile.

I'm a novice at this matter so I may be wrong, would appreciate any guidance.

@Crysto, thanks for the info, the swifts seems to be some kind of a lottery, some people had their gamma close to 2.2 out of the box and some other people (me included) had an astonishingly low gamma of 1.4 out of the box. I know a friend that didn't need to do any calibration as his gamma is ~2.1 already.

 

I'm wondering why CPKeeper works in some games while Color Sustainer doesn't. For example Batman Arkham City, Color sustainer can't sustain ICC for this game, however CPKeeper works fine.

 

Color Sustainer works fine for me in Arkham City. May you please provide me with more details and screenshots? My guess is that Arkham City is switching to another refresh rate and there is no color profile associated with that refresh rate. Are you use global profile association or mode - specific?

 

@yasamoka, nevermind I got it working after a reboot, no idea what was causing color sustainer not to work. sorry for posting too quickly.

Are there any plans to include a similar feature to what CPKeeper has, where it captures the current gamma ramp and saves it into a cpk file? This way we can capture settings inside Nvidia control panel and enforce them using Color Sustainer.

Thanks!

 

Surely there is! But having ample time to work on code is getting increasingly difficult with all the semester load. There's always some coursework you could be doing to meet deadlines instead, if you get what I mean. Nevertheless, it's an easy feature to implement and I'll be including it in the next version I release.

 

What's all the talk about Powerstrip, does color sustainer not work for some games? I have an .icc profile and a gtx670, I have associated the profile and text bar has turned green, I assume there is nothing else to do as the software takes care of things.