ColourSpace vs PsyCalibrator

ColourSpace is display calibration and colour management software for professional film, post-production, broadcast, medical, Pro AV, and home cinema work. It profiles display performance and uses those measurements to generate calibration LUTs. Interactive volumetric 3D graphs help assess measured colour points and their errors; higher license levels support native LUT generation at 1024³ and beyond. The maker lists integrations with displays and video systems including ASUS ProArt, EIZO, BenQ, LG TVs, AJA ColorBox, Lumagen Radiance, and madVR Envy. ColourSpace is a native Windows x64 application. The maker says Mac use is possible through full Windows emulation and describes a native macOS version as in development. ColourSpace ZRO is free for manual calibration and verification, but has no LUT capability, volumetric graphs, or calibration reports. Standard licenses cover one PC, require internet access for activation and periodic checks, and can be moved through up to five deactivation and activation cycles. Pricing is listed from £125.

PsyCalibrator is a free, open-source package for measuring display luminance and color and calibrating gamma. It uses a Spyder5, SpyderX, or SpyderX2 instrument and returns measurements as CIE 1931 xyY coordinates. Its correction workflow adjusts the relationship between RGB intensity and luminance to be linear, for grayscale or individual color channels. The fitting process incorporates Mcalibrator2 and uses cubic spline interpolation as its main method. Users can apply correction through a color lookup table and restore the display to its uncorrected state. PsyCalibrator supports Windows, macOS, and Linux and includes multi-monitor calibration. Its research workflow requires MATLAB or GNU Octave, Psychtoolbox, and a supported Spyder instrument. The tutorial says Windows users need a photometer driver; Linux and Mac users do not. SpyderX and SpyderX2 can use built-in Windows 10 or 11 drivers with Psychtoolbox 3.0.19 or later. For more accurate measurements, the tutorial recommends keeping ambient light steady and using a sensor area smaller than the target stimulus.