ICC printer profiling · free & open source
ChromIQ builds a custom ICC profile for your exact printer, ink and paper — the colour fingerprint that makes prints match your screen. It drives ArgyllCMS through a calm five-step wizard, so you never touch the command line.
Free under the GPLv3. Needs ArgyllCMS 3.5.0 — ChromIQ finds it for you on first launch.
The five steps
Each step has a Guided path with sensible defaults and a Manual path that exposes every ArgyllCMS control, side by side. A clickable ⓘ on every screen explains what to do.
Generate a test chart of colour patches, sized to your paper and instrument. Guided picks sensible settings from an empirical patch-capacity database; Manual exposes every targen / printtarg flag with a live preview of the exact sheet.
Print it the way profiling needs — with colour management off. A PostScript pipeline on macOS, an automatic TIFF fallback for AirPrint / driverless printers, or the native OS dialog with the driver's colour controls locked. Preflight checks paper size and orientation first.
Read the printed patches with your spectrophotometer. Keyboard-driven strip reading — Enter confirms, F/B step forward and back — plus read-again-and-average to cut instrument noise. ChromIQ knows your instrument's reading pace, checks every strip's speed live and tells you when a swipe was too fast to be reliable — with optional sounds for every event, so your eyes can stay on the chart.
Turn the measurements into an ICC profile with colprof. RGB, CMYK and multi-channel DeviceN targets; CIECAM02 viewing-condition presets; media attributes embedded in the profile header.
See the profile's accuracy in ΔE, inspect the 3D gamut volume it can reproduce, and run a second-pass pre-conditioning refinement that samples harder where your printer is least accurate.
New in the latest release
Reuse a chart you already measured, or load a target you own — a Wolf Faust IT8, an X-Rite ColorChecker, a LaserSoft chart. ChromIQ lays a reading grid over your scan (or photo) so it sits exactly on the patches, then builds a scanner or camera ICC profile.
.cxf,
spectral .txt) — no command line.
More than the wizard
Sensible one-click defaults, or every ArgyllCMS flag exposed with a live preview — same window, your choice.
A raw PostScript/TIFF path that bypasses ColorSync and driver colour correction, so the chart prints exactly as sent.
Rotate the colour volume your profile reproduces and compare it against a reference space like Adobe RGB.
Reuse a measured chart — or a bought IT8 / ColorChecker target — to build an input profile for a scanner or a camera.
Optional linearisation pass (printcal / applycal) before profiling, for printers without built-in calibration.
Import and export i1Profiler charts and measurements, so ChromIQ fits into an existing X-Rite workflow.
Build device-link profiles and soft-proof an image with an out-of-gamut mask before you commit ink to paper.
Every screen has a clickable ⓘ that explains the step, and what you need, in words a beginner can follow.
A profile run holds its own chart, measurement, settings and description, so going back to an older run shows what that run was actually made with. Nothing you made is deleted — only archived, with the date.
Measure a chart printed through a finished profile and the result is filed by date with its own report. Earlier checks are never overwritten, so you can watch a profile drift over months.
A strip accepted, a patch misread, a session finished — each can play a sound, so you can keep your eyes on the chart instead of the screen.
German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Japanese and Chinese — every button, message, tooltip and help text, not just the menus.
The Tools menu
Beyond the five-step wizard, a menu of focused tools — grouped by task, each a small guided dialog with its own plain-language help.
Companion app
The test-chart / patch-set editor is also a small standalone app. Build and combine patch sets, generate colour distributions, and inspect them as a 3D point cloud — then hand the result to ChromIQ or to i1Profiler. Free and open source, like everything here.
Companion app
A profile is a fitted model of your printer: it smooths, it interpolates,
and near the edges it can promise a little more than the paper really
gave. This asks the measurements instead — every corner of the shape
is a patch that was printed and read. Open the .ti3 from any
chart you have measured and look at it in 3D.
Free and open source, like everything here.
Under the hood
Free · GPLv3
Download ChromIQ, point it at ArgyllCMS, and build your first profile in an afternoon — no command line, no subscription.