I can now chuck “calibration loaders” in my startup items (usually added when you install calibration software) in favor for using a powertoy for Windows XP.
It’s called the Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet. It’s free, and it’s designed to enable single-card users to load separate color profiles for multiple displays. The operative term here is single-card because if you have two video-cards, or are on a Mac, then you probably won’t have to worry about this. If you’re on a WindowsXP 32bit machine however, and are using a dual head card which is common in gaming GPUs, then you probably will have to deal with this.
Simply download the applet and install it (requires the .NET framework). It will then be available as a control panel applet as seen in the picture above.
After you add/install/load and set the default profiles you created for each monitor (with whatever calibration software you have), simply create a shortcut with the following target path (make sure you include the quotes):
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Save the shortcut, and put it into your startup folder and you’re set. It should load the separate profiles natively on startup.
Now if only they update that to support Windows XP 64-bit.
I also discovered great alternative calibration software that seem to be one of the best in the business. One is ColorEyes Display by Integrated Color Corporation, and BasICColor’s Display.
Now for some reason, these two software can be considered as one and the same. They use the same calibration engine, they just have different extra features and GUIs. Suffice to say that they seem to be very promising alternatives to current proprietary calibration software because they work with multiple colorimeters.
I have ColorEyes Display installed on the Powerbook, but BasICColor Display on the PC, and I think aside from having a similar calibration engine, BasICColor trumps ColorEyes with more comprehensive pre/post calibration options.
What I really find useful is the realtime monitor adjustment measurement option BasICColor has. Basically, it’s a dialog which repeatedly spits out shades of gray and outputs the Red, Green, Blue, and Luminance values detected by the colorimeter at each interval. The purpose of which is for you to manually calibrate your monitor if it has hardware controls to get a somewhat neutral display tone before you start calibration proper. I guess the best analogy here is importance of having a flat EQ on an audio signal source you wish to process further.
Of course, the slider function (which I will now call it to save time) has another very useful… er, use for me. My 64-bit partition still only allows the loading of one color profile for both monitors – ergo what the slider function allowed me to do is apply a best-attempt of manually matching two different monitors on a hardware level – so at the very least, they’ll be close to each other no matter what profile they end up using (or if they use any at all).
I wish BasICClolor would update their supported device list to include the Spyder2 colorimiter (ColorEyes does, but I don’t want it! hehehe) – because I just had it ordered. More on that in a new post.