customdisplayprofiles

This is a simple command-line Python script that can check, set or unset a custom ColorSync ICC profile for a given display. It uses PyObjC and the most current (as of 2013) ColorSync API to do this.

Usage

Setting a profile

Use the set action to set a profile (as the user running the command) for the main display.

customdisplayprofiles set /path/to/profile.icc

Use the --display option to configure an alternate display.

customdisplayprofiles set --display 2 /path/to/profile.icc

If you want to get a list of displays with their associated index:

customdisplayprofiles displays

Configurable user scope

The --user-scope option allows you to define whether the profile will be applied to the "Current" or "Any" user domain, which may allow you set this preference as a default for all users:

customdisplayprofiles set --user-scope any /path/to/profile.icc

Specifying any here requires root privileges, as it will write these preferences to a system-owned location.

More information on the user preferences system on OS X can be found here and here.

Retrieving the current profile

The full path to an ICC profile can be printed to stdout:

customdisplayprofiles current-path

This could be useful if you want to check the current setting using an idempotent login script or a configuration framework like Puppet.

current-path will output nothing if there is no profile currently set for that display.

Full details

A more complete dictionary of information can be printed with the info action:

➜ ./customdisplayprofiles info
{
    CustomProfiles =     {
        1 = "file://localhost/Library/Application%20Support/Adobe/Color/Profiles/SMPTE-C.icc";
    };
    DeviceClass = mntr;
    DeviceDescription = iMac;
    DeviceHostScope = kCFPreferencesCurrentHost;
    DeviceID = " 00000610-0000-B005-0000-0000042C0140";
    DeviceUserScope = kCFPreferencesAnyUser;
    FactoryProfiles =     {
        1 =         {
            DeviceModeDescription = iMac;
            DeviceProfileURL = "file://localhost/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays/iMac-00000610-0000-B005-0000-0000042C0140.icc";
        };
        DeviceDefaultProfileID = 1;
    };
}

Sample wrapper script

There's a (very simple) example script in the sample-helper-login-script folder, which demonstrates how you could wrap this utility in an environment where you don't manage the ICC profiles directly. Someone calibrating a display would only need to drop the profile in a known folder location, indexed by display number, and at login for all users, the desired color profiles are configured for each online display.

Building a pkg

You might want to build a pkg to deploy the script to one or more Macs in your environment. To create a pkg so, you can run the make command in the repo folder. The included Makefile will be used to create a package which will install customdisplayprofiles in /usr/local/bin If you'd like to install the script at a different path, you can override the default when creating the package with
make INSTALLPATH=/path/to/installfolder

If you're also using munki, there's a make munki command to import the package into your munki repository.

# first run make to create the pkg
make

# Then, import the package into munki
make MUNKI_REPO_SUBDIR=util munki