A Simple Color Calibration Guide for Manjaro Linux

When I installed Manjaro Linux on my HP laptop, I noticed that the screen was more blueish than normal. This is a very simple guide on how to fix that in minimal steps.

1. First update your system with sudo pacman -Syyu

2. Download monica color calibration tool (which is basically a GUI front end for xgamma binary) with sudo pacman -S monica

3. Launch Monica from the start menu:

At first you will notice that the gamma of all colors are equal to 1. Then you will move the sliders until you can see the colors are balanced as shown. However, you will need a grey color as your reference first.

4. Download this image, or the silver coin of your country from images.google.com, increase your laptop brightness to maximum then start moving the sliders while looking at the silver coins. Your calibration is correct if the coins look as grey as they should, if there is a reddish, blueish, greenish or yellowish color cast, it means something is wrong.

In my case, the silver coins looked too blueish so I had to reduce the blue gamma slider until the coin looked properly grey.

5. After you finish calibration, you may need to adjust the gamma brightness, so how do you do that? By moving all the sliders with an equal number of points. So let's say blue is 70, red and green are 75, then to reduce or increase the gamma brightness you can make blue as 72 and green and red as 77, adding 2 points for each. You will do the brightness calibration based on the black box in Monica on the left. Once you can barely see the inner black box it means that you're good to go.

6. If for some reason you are still unsatisfied with the colors on your screen you can add a natural photo reference such as this one, and start moving the sliders with your common sense as to what seems normal. In my case, I used this photo to adjust the red color to make the monitor look more vibrant. But this may not be an accurate way.

7. After you are done with your calibrations on Monica, Save & Exit then open the terminal and write the following:

Make sure you are in home directory:

cd $HOME

Look into monica generated file:

cat .monicarc

It will display something like this:
xgamma -quiet -rgamma 0.88 -ggamma 0.85 -bgamma 0.72

Now
vi .profile 
OR
nano .profile

Then add the above line at the end of the .profile, save and exit. If you don't know how to use a text editor use the following command (replace the line in between quotations with your own .monicarc output).

echo "xgamma -quiet -rgamma 0.88 -ggamma 0.85 -bgamma 0.72" >>.profile

Adding this line to .profile will restore gamma settings at each startup, so that you don't have to calibrate every time you restart your computer.

I hope you enjoyed this guide, if you feel it added value feel free to tip:

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