Where display profiles are stored, and how to load them automatically.

    MS Windows Me and 98: C:\Windows\System\Color

    MS Windows NT: C:\Winnt\system32\spool\drivers\color

    MS Window 2000, XP and Vista: C:\Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color

An alternative to using dispwin -I to install your display profiles, is to use the Display Property dialog, advanced settings, Color management tab, and locate the profile and install it there. This in itself does not cause the profile to be made use of anywhere in your system.

If you are using Adobe Photoshop on your system, then you can tell it to use your monitor profile by editing the appropriate registry key, typically "My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Adobe\Color\Monitor\Monitor0", to contain the name of the display profile, and then restart Photoshop This is the simplest way of ensuring that the Adobe calibration loader tool Adobe Gamma loads the video hardware lookup tables from the vcgt tag, and uses the profile as its display profile.

The adobe gamma tool can be told to use your profile, but the procedure is slightly tricky: Open adobe gamma from photoshop (in the Help->Color Management... menu item), select "Open Adobe Gamma", and select the "Load.." button. Select your profile and "Open". Select "OK" in the Adobe Gamma, it will then ask you to save it's modified version of your profile under a different name. Chose a name for the modified profile, and save it. Exit from Photoshop. Copy the profile you want to use, over the modified profile that you saved in Adobe Gamma. (If you don't do the last step, the profile Photoshop will be using will have been modified in strange ways from what you intended.)

Installing a profile on Microsoft Windows generally doesn't mean that the profiles calibration will be automatically loaded into a display on startup. A separated tool is usually needed to achiev this.

Some Microsoft Windows applications may come with "Gamma/VCGT/RAMDAC/Video LUT" loader tools, consult their documentation and check your Start Menu Startup folders. If you don't want to use any of these 3rd party tools, you can also use the dispwin tool to do this for you, as it takes either a .cal or ICC file as an argument. The xcalib tool could also be used.

To add a startup item that will load a profiles calibration into the display using dispwin, use the following instructions:

On the task bar, right click and select "Properties", then select the "Advanced" tab, then click "Add..". then browse till you locate dispwin.exe. In the box containing the path to dispwin.exe, add a space then the option -L, eg:

    c:\bin\argyll\dispwin -L

If you don't want to use the default installed profile, you could explicitly set the calibration file to use as an argument:

    c:\bin\argyll\dispwin c:\myprofiles\mydisplay.icm

Click "Next >", select the "Startup" folder, then name the item (ie. "Argyll Calibration Loader"), then press "Finish".

You can test it out by simply navigating the "Start" menu to the "Startup" folder and selecting the item you've just created. If you want to alter any of the details, navigate to the item again and right click it, and select "Properties". More than one startup item can be created to set the calibration for more than one display. You may want to cut and paste the "Target" line to a normal Command Prompt shell to check that it works as expected, as it is impossible to catch error messages in the startup.