Installing two different manufactures monitor calibration software.

I would like to know if I'm inviting major headaches if I install monitor

calibration software from two different companies on my computer.

Hi Louie, I can't think of anything my (Gretag-Macbeth) software does except, in the end, generate a profile which is just a file that describes my display settings. To my knowledge, running the software doesn't change anything that can't be easily un-done by selecting a different profile. So I suspect you could but I've never tried it. I think certain monitors (Eizo perhaps?) ship with someone else's colorimeter, in effect, doing the same thing. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong! ;-) Good luck!

To some degree, it depends on your platform. On Windows, calibration software will

sometimes install something that, at startup, loads your video card with the profile (more

accurately, with the tone response curve) generated during calibration. If you install two

calibration software packages, it's at least possible that they will conflict. It won't cause a

hardware conflict, but you might have to disable one to make sure the profile you want is

being loaded.

 

This is pre-Vista only. I know hardly anything about Vista.

 

On Macs, the operating system does this loading, and you can tell it which profile (again,

more accurately, tone response curve) to load. So only one gets loaded and you can choose

which one that would be in your System Preferences.

 

On my Mac, I have both ColorEyes Display Pro and EyeOne Match installed. No issues. I

hardly ever use EyeOne Match any more, though.

The only problem is the LUT loader. You only need one, but it has to be able to load LUTs from any profile assigned to the monitor.

 

On XP an easy solution is to use the color control panel applet's winclor.exe /L loader instead - it loads pretty much anything. The Readme contains instructions on the loader (you just need a shortcut in the Startup folder to replace other loaders).

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/colorcontrol.mspx

 

In Vista... For me startup LUT loaders don't work in the first place, I have to run them manually. So first check if they work at all. Then you'd need to run some tests to figure out if one loader can load LUTs from the vcgt tag of a profile created by another software. Sometimes it works. Otherwise just run the appropriate loader manually.

And like Obi Thomas has mentioned on Macs there are no issues.

There's also an opensource loader that has a windows executable among other things - you can give it a try, too. Xcalib:

 

http://www.etg.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de/web/doe/xcalib/

Thank you for the replys!