Parallels and Color Profile

I currently run Capture One on the Windows side of my Mac, but the monitor calibration has been done on the OS X side. Will I have to calibrate the monitor on the Windows side as well or will the OS X generated profile serve both?

Since C1 is a cross platform license, why not run C1 on the Mac side?

Others can correct me if I'm wrong since I don't run anything this way but I believe that you simply need to tell Windows to load the same ICS profile that you created on the Mac side.

E.J. Peiker wrote:Since C1 is a cross platform license, why not run C1 on the Mac side?

Others can correct me if I'm wrong since I don't run anything this way but I believe that you simply need to tell Windows to load the same ICS profile that you created on the Mac side.

Thanks for the info, E.J. Now I need to figure out how to tell Windows to load the profile. I am effectively Windows-illiterate, and need it on my machine only for one account where the client insists that his work be done in Visio and not one of the Mac equivalents.

Which for now turns out to be a blessing. C1 v8 requires OS X 10.9 and my first generation Mac Pro can't run anything higher than 10.7 (Windows 8 works fine, though). A replacement for that machine is still out for at least 3 month, so this is a temporary workaround.

First place a copy of the ICC file that was created when you calibrated the Mac into the following folder
c:Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color

The remaining instructions are for Win 7, it may have changed for Win 8 so you may have to look this up
Next go into Control Panel and Select the Display Option, Click on change resolution or change appearance of display
Click on Advanced Settings and then click on the Color Management tab and then click the Color Management Button
Now click on the add button and scroll through the list to find your color profile. Once you have that, click on the button to make it the default profile.

Thanks again.

As far as I know, you should be able to use the same monitor ICC profile between Mac OS X and Windows running on the exactly same video card and monitor. At least, as far as Windows is concerned. That's because Windows is extremely hands-off with regards to colour management; it does almost nothing except maintain a collection of profiles and make them available to whatever app asks for them. Mac OS X is a lot more activist when it comes to colour management; the ColorSync system function does all kinds of stuff through-out Mac OS X, both at the app and operating system levels. But as far as I know, none of what ColorSync does should monkey with a monitor profile in ways that would make it unusable on a Windows instance running on the self-same hardware.

Here's a slightly easier 1st step to E.J.'s procedure. Copy the monitor ICC profile from your Mac side to the Windows side, and place it in any temp folder you like on Windows. Then simply right-click on the file and select the top entry of the flyout menu, "Install Profile". This eliminates the need to know which operating system location the profile should go into; Windows will put it where it belongs.

After that, step #2 is to make the monitor profile the default for Windows. Windows itself isn't colour managed, but all applications that need to find the monitor profile do so by asking Windows for it. If Windows doesn't register your monitor profile as the default one, most colour managed apps will be clueless. Use E.J.'s description for making the new profile the Windows default.

You need to do a 3rd thing as well, or else setup of monitor calibration on the Windows side is not yet complete. The normal procedure on Windows involves running the calibration software itself on Windows. Part of the package is always a small utility program that gets installed in Windows Startup; this utility is usually called a "LUT loader", and it's responsible for extracting some calibration data from the ICC profile and loading it directly into the video card every time you boot Windows. This is not something that Windows colour managed apps do, they all expect something else to take care of the video card. (On Mac OS X, it's the ColorSync system function that takes care of it. Apple invented this idea of storing video card calibration data inside the ICC profile, and using it to set up the video card when the system boots.)

Since you're not running the calibration software on the Windows side, you probably don't have the LUT loader utility installed either. Fortunately, starting with Windows 7, Microsoft finally got around to adding a small function into the Windows Colour Management control panel applet that E.J. described above. This new function lets you tell Windows itself to load the video card LUT data, like ColorSync does on Mac OS X. This is the only colour management function that Windows will do, but it's an important one because it ensures that your calibrated black point, white point, colour temperature and gamma curve are put in place in the video card. Otherwise they won't be, and you won't get accurate colour display even though you've installed the ICC profile and made it the Windows default.

I'm not running any Windows 8 machines at this point, and probably never will. But here's a good reference that explains how to configure Windows 7 to load the calibration data. Hopefully it's the exact same steps in Win 8.x... indeed, from some quick checking on Google, it looks like it is the same.
http://www.laszlopusztai.net/2009/08/23 ... windows-7/

Cool trick, didn't know that one Royce.

E.J. Peiker wrote:First place a copy of the ICC file that was created when you calibrated the Mac into the following folder
c:Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color

The remaining instructions are for Win 7, it may have changed for Win 8 so you may have to look this up
Next go into Control Panel and Select the Display Option, Click on change resolution or change appearance of display
Click on Advanced Settings and then click on the Color Management tab and then click the Color Management Button
Now click on the add button and scroll through the list to find your color profile.  Once you have that, click on the button to make it the default profile.

This procedure will also work in Win 8/8.1

Thanks for confirming that Dick!

Thanks for the detailed information, Royce. Installing the Spyder software also in Windows seems indeed a key requirement here.

Also thanks to Dick for confirming that this works in 8/8.1 as well.

Jens, installing the Spyder software on the Windows side is not a requirement if you follow the 3 steps above.