Tristim: a tool that measures how your Wayland compositor actually reproduces color (SDR and HDR), using a Spyder/i1Display colorimeter

A capture in progress: each measured sample embedded in CIELAB at its own color, with the trial's gamut cage and expected→measured error vectors, while the colorimeter works through the remaining patches

A few months ago I wanted to try dialing in the color representations on my monitor array to match each other, so I got one of the standard Spyder colorimeter tools off of amazon. Turns out that all the drivers and applications for it are locked to either x11 or one of the proprietary OS's -- neither of which was going to help me with my project. This is the solution to that.

Tristim is a rust GUI tool and some new crates built around using usb colorimeters on Wayland. It focuses on using the hardware and correlating what color points and formats were presented to your compositor with what readings the sensor is making. The display test component also speaks the full wp_color_management_v1 protocol, so patches can be presented as real HDR (PQ/BT.2020) content.

It also features an interactive 3d representation of the results -- letting you see visually where the compositor+display stackup is coherent versus out-of-spec. Exporting both .csv and .ti3 representations of session data is also possible for your own use. This means you can use the ArgyllCMS toolchain to build ICC profiles with the data collected by Tristim.

This also includes a re-implementation of usb drivers for a few of the most common colorimeter pucks (thanks to ArgyllCMS for the protocol docs). While I only have the one device (Spyder 2024) to validate against, we have also implemented drivers for a few of the other common variants that had the necessary reference material (SpyderX, i1Display Pro/ColorMunki family, etc) -- any help testing them would be greatly appreciated.

GitHub | AUR

(Most of the actual implementation was done by Claude, closely supervised -- the design decisions are all my own, and everything is validated on the hardware I have)