Releases: itsab1989/ChromIQ
Release list
ChromIQ v3.14.7
- The chart-reading engine can now also drive XY tables and chart readers
(opt-in). Motorised XY tables (the GretagMacbeth SpectroScan) and autonomous
chart readers (the X-Rite i1iSis and DTP70) previously always used Argyll's
chartread. A new Settings → Beta option, "Also drive XY tables and chart
readers with the engine", lets the ChromIQ engine measure them too — filling
in the expected-vs-measured preview as sheets are read and saving after every
sheet. It is off by default: these instruments are rare and the new path
has not yet been tested on real hardware, so unless you turn it on they keep
measuring exactly as before. With the engine's own strip and patch modes, that
makes the engine cover every interactive reading mode.
Installation (Linux, beta): Download the tarball for your architecture (x86_64 for most desktops/laptops, aarch64 for ARM systems like Raspberry Pi 4/5). Extract with tar xzf ChromIQ-Linux-*.tar.gz, then run ./ChromIQ/ChromIQ. Requires ArgyllCMS — install via your package manager (sudo apt install argyll) or from argyllcms.com/downloadlinux.html.
☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.
ChromIQ v3.14.6
- Patch-by-patch measuring now autosaves after every patch. Previously a
patch-by-patch session only wrote its measurement file at the very end, so an
interrupted read (an unplugged instrument, a crash) lost everything you'd
scanned. It now saves after each patch — exactly like strip reading does after
each strip — so you can always resume from the last patch you measured.
Installation (Linux, beta): Download the tarball for your architecture (x86_64 for most desktops/laptops, aarch64 for ARM systems like Raspberry Pi 4/5). Extract with tar xzf ChromIQ-Linux-*.tar.gz, then run ./ChromIQ/ChromIQ. Requires ArgyllCMS — install via your package manager (sudo apt install argyll) or from argyllcms.com/downloadlinux.html.
☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.
ChromIQ v3.14.5
- Patch-by-patch measuring now has the full live preview. When you measure
a chart one patch at a time (Measure → Manual → “Patch-by-patch mode”) with
the ChromIQ chart-reading engine, the preview now guides you exactly like
strip reading does: the patch to measure next is highlighted, the view
follows it across pages, and every patch you read fills in with the colour the
chart expected versus the colour your instrument measured — hover a
patch to see both as RGB and L*a*b* plus the ΔE. You can also click any
patch in the preview to jump straight to it. Previously patch-by-patch mode
fell back to plain ArgyllCMS with only text prompts and no live guidance. The
engine now drives both interactive reading modes — strips and single patches. - Fix — patch-by-patch no longer hangs on instruments that must calibrate
first. On a meter like the ColorMunki that asks to be calibrated at the
start, patch-by-patch mode would freeze; the calibration request now appears
as the normal ChromIQ dialog and measuring proceeds.
Installation (Linux, beta): Download the tarball for your architecture (x86_64 for most desktops/laptops, aarch64 for ARM systems like Raspberry Pi 4/5). Extract with tar xzf ChromIQ-Linux-*.tar.gz, then run ./ChromIQ/ChromIQ. Requires ArgyllCMS — install via your package manager (sudo apt install argyll) or from argyllcms.com/downloadlinux.html.
☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.
ChromIQ v3.14.4
- See the numbers behind any measured patch, right in the preview. With the
ChromIQ chart-reading engine, the Measure preview already splits each patch
into the colour the chart expected and the colour your instrument read. A new
“Show patch values on hover” option (Measure → Live preview) adds a small
card that follows your mouse and shows, for the patch under it, both colours
as RGB and as exact L*a*b*, plus the ΔE between them — so you can check a
suspicious patch without leaving the measuring screen. It follows the “Each
patch shows” setting, saves as a default, and travels in a preset. - The chart’s file path no longer pops up over the chart while you measure.
The path/name tooltip used to appear on the chart image during a read, getting
in the way of swiping and the new hover card; it is now held back until the
measurement finishes (and still sits on the header text throughout).
Installation: Open the DMG, drag ChromIQ to Applications, eject, then launch.
ChromIQ is ad-hoc signed (not notarized). On macOS Sonoma+ the right-click → Open trick often fails with "Apple cannot check it for malicious software." If that happens, remove the quarantine flag in Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ChromIQ.app
Then double-click as normal.
Requires macOS 13+ (Ventura) and ArgyllCMS 3.5.0 at /Applications/Argyll/bin.
☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.
ChromIQ v3.14.3
- The number of automatic calibration retries is now adjustable (mavtop).
ChromIQ retries a failed instrument calibration a few times before giving up,
which rescues an ageing instrument whose lamp needs a couple of strikes to burn
in. That count is now a setting (Settings → Beta → “Retry a failed calibration
up to…”), so an old i1Pro that wants ten attempts can have them. Default is 3
(four tries in total); set it to 0 to turn retries off. It only affects the
ChromIQ chart-reading engine.
Installation (Linux, beta): Download the tarball for your architecture (x86_64 for most desktops/laptops, aarch64 for ARM systems like Raspberry Pi 4/5). Extract with tar xzf ChromIQ-Linux-*.tar.gz, then run ./ChromIQ/ChromIQ. Requires ArgyllCMS — install via your package manager (sudo apt install argyll) or from argyllcms.com/downloadlinux.html.
☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.
ChromIQ v3.14.2
- A failed calibration no longer leaves measuring stuck (mavtop). When the
ChromIQ engine reported a failed calibration it waited for an answer that
ChromIQ never sent, so the run stopped dead — no error, no way forward, and
the message explaining what happened never appeared because it is only shown
once a run has finished. ChromIQ now always answers. - Calibration is retried automatically (mavtop). An older bus-powered
instrument can fail to calibrate simply because striking the lamp briefly
draws more power than the USB port supplies, and then succeed moments later.
Rather than stopping at the first failure, ChromIQ now tries up to four times,
pausing a couple of seconds between attempts so the instrument can recover,
and tells you in the log what it is doing. Only if all four attempts fail does
it report the problem — and it can then still fall back to ArgyllCMS's own
chartread. Leave the instrument where it is while it retries.
Installation: Open the DMG, drag ChromIQ to Applications, eject, then launch.
ChromIQ is ad-hoc signed (not notarized). On macOS Sonoma+ the right-click → Open trick often fails with "Apple cannot check it for malicious software." If that happens, remove the quarantine flag in Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ChromIQ.app
Then double-click as normal.
Requires macOS 13+ (Ventura) and ArgyllCMS 3.5.0 at /Applications/Argyll/bin.
☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.
ChromIQ v3.14.1
- Measurement Report — the cube corners are the chart's real ideals again
(Knut). Expected values were being read out of the chart's.ti2in the
wrong colour space: printtarg records an RGB chart's design colours under D65,
but the report compared them in D50. Paper white came out as a bluish
Lab 100/-2.3/-19.3 instead of a neutral 100/0/0, and every corner looked
invented rather than the textbook ideal. The design reference is now adapted to
D50 first, so the corners match the sRGB primaries exactly and every ΔE in the
report is correct — this affected all reports built against a chart, not
just imported ones. - Measurement Report — charts whose
.ti2stores XYZ 0..1 are read correctly
(Knut). printtarg writes the design colours either 0..100 or normalised
0..1, with nothing in the header to tell them apart. The normalised form was
taken at face value, making every expected colour 100× too dark (a chart's
white read as L* 9) and its ΔE meaningless. The scale is now detected and
normalised. - Measuring falls back to ArgyllCMS when ChromIQ's engine can't use your
instrument (mavtop). v3.14.0 turned the ChromIQ chart-reading engine on by
default. If it could not drive a particular meter, measuring simply stopped
there — even when ArgyllCMS's own chartread would have worked. ChromIQ now
notices a failed start and quietly restarts the run on stock chartread, so you
can carry on measuring. It only ever does this before the first reading is
taken, never after a strip has been read, and never when you stopped the run
yourself. - The calibration prompt now shows what your instrument actually asked for
(mavtop). The engine reports the exact calibration step, but ChromIQ threw
that away and showed one generic message for every case. It now passes the
instrument's own instruction through, and offers a "Skip this step" button
when the instrument says the step is optional. - Fixed unreadable characters in the calibration prompt. For calibration
steps that carry no message of their own — an X-Rite ColorMunki asking for its
calibration position, for instance — the measuring engine sent uninitialised
data instead of an empty message, which would have appeared as random
characters in the dialog. - Clip border — the text no longer runs into the patch area (Knut). The
stacked lines were justified across the full strip width, which pushed the last
line's ink past the inner edge and over the patches. Lines now keep their
natural spacing and start at the outer text-edge distance, so the block always
stays inside the strip. Only the font size grows — until the longest line
reaches the text-edge along the strip, or the stack reaches it across. - Clip border — deleting the blank lines between records now visibly tightens
the text (Knut). Because the lines were stretched to fill the strip whatever
their number, removing the blank lines between them changed nothing on screen. - Clip border — "Example custom table" is now called "Custom text example"
(Knut).
Installation: Open the DMG, drag ChromIQ to Applications, eject, then launch.
ChromIQ is ad-hoc signed (not notarized). On macOS Sonoma+ the right-click → Open trick often fails with "Apple cannot check it for malicious software." If that happens, remove the quarantine flag in Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ChromIQ.app
Then double-click as normal.
Requires macOS 13+ (Ventura) and ArgyllCMS 3.5.0 at /Applications/Argyll/bin.
☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.
ChromIQ v3.14.0
The chart-reading engine, the Measurement Report and the i1Profiler import
features that have matured across the 3.13.12 beta series are now on by default
and part of the stable release. Highlights since v3.13.11:
- New: chart-reading engine, on by default. ChromIQ now reads strips itself,
with a live split preview of the chart, per-strip autosave, click a patch to
jump there and re-read, and clearer stripe detection. (The classic ArgyllCMS
reader is still available in Settings.) - New: Measurement Report tool (Tools → Measurement report). Measure a chart
and get a clear Pass/Fail report of how accurately it reproduced — average,
worst and spread of the colour difference (ΔE00), the worst patches, paper
white & black and the cube corners. Add several measurements of the same
printer and it plots the drift over time, so you can see when ageing inks or a
wandering printer make it worth re-profiling. Save it as a PDF. A dated report
can be written automatically after every measurement (Settings → Reports). - New: read i1Profiler measurements directly. Everywhere ChromIQ asks for a
measurement — Build Profile, the Measurement Report, Convert, the
scanner-target import — you can now hand it i1Profiler's own files
(.mxf / .txt / .cxf) and ChromIQ converts them for you, no export step needed.
Handy if you measure with an i1iSis or i1iO. - New: keyboard shortcuts + a "Keyboard shortcuts" Help card. App-wide
shortcuts (all carrying ⌘ or an F-key so they never clash with the instrument
during a measurement), ⌘1–5 to jump between tabs and then the arrow keys to
move along the tab strip. - Chart layout & clip border. The ChromIQ layout engine gained a reworked
clip border — auto-filled record strip, a 180° flip so a right-side border
reads the right way up, text that now reaches the edges on every side — plus
instrument-margin handling and an editable example table. - Profiles for CMYK and CMYK+N printers. End-to-end support for printers
driven by their inks, including a built-in profile engine for six inks and
beyond, N-channel profcheck and a gamut helper. - Tidier working folders. Each profile now keeps its reports, exports and
tool intermediates in their own sub-folders; older projects are migrated
automatically the first time you open them. - Snappier UI. Faster tab switching (styling is remembered per theme) and a
smoother first chart render with a custom font. - Fully translated into twelve languages — German, Spanish, French, Italian,
Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and Simplified
Chinese — including every tooltip and the long in-app help texts.
The per-beta detail for everything above is retained below.
Installation: Open the DMG, drag ChromIQ to Applications, eject, then launch.
ChromIQ is ad-hoc signed (not notarized). On macOS Sonoma+ the right-click → Open trick often fails with "Apple cannot check it for malicious software." If that happens, remove the quarantine flag in Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ChromIQ.app
Then double-click as normal.
Requires macOS 13+ (Ventura) and ArgyllCMS 3.5.0 at /Applications/Argyll/bin.
☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.
ChromIQ v3.13.12-beta.35
- Clip border — the text reaches the edges on the sides too (Knut). Short
clip records with one long line (e.g. the Example table's header) left the
lines packed in the middle of the strip. The lines are now spread across the
strip's width so they reach the "Text distance from edge" on the left/right as
well, not just top and bottom. - Snappier tab switching. Switching to a tab no longer re-computes its
styling from scratch every time — it's remembered per theme — so the heavier
tabs (Create Chart, Build Profile) come up faster. Theme changes still restyle
everything. - Smoother first chart render with a custom font. The list of installed fonts
is now prepared quietly in the background just after launch, so the first chart
that uses a system font doesn't pause to gather them.
Installation: Open the DMG, drag ChromIQ to Applications, eject, then launch.
ChromIQ is ad-hoc signed (not notarized). On macOS Sonoma+ the right-click → Open trick often fails with "Apple cannot check it for malicious software." If that happens, remove the quarantine flag in Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ChromIQ.app
Then double-click as normal.
Requires macOS 13+ (Ventura) and ArgyllCMS 3.5.0 at /Applications/Argyll/bin.
☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.
ChromIQ v3.13.12-beta.34
- Keyboard — arrows move between tabs (Basti). After ⌘1–5 (or Tab to the tab
strip), the ← / → keys now switch tabs. The Keyboard-shortcuts card lists it. - Scanner-target import takes i1Profiler's .mxf/.cxf directly (Knut). The
measurement picker only offered .ti3/.txt even though ChromIQ already converts
the others; it now lists .mxf / .txt / .cxf, with matching help text. - Measurement Report — the PDF saves in a sensible place (Knut). An imported
i1Profiler measurement is converted in a temporary folder, and the report used
to try to save there. It now defaults to a "reports" folder next to the file
you loaded (created if missing). - Measurement Report — tidier header with many measurements (Knut). Loading a
whole folder of measurements no longer prints a long list of names in the page
header; past a handful it shows the run count and date range instead.
Installation (Linux, beta): Download the tarball for your architecture (x86_64 for most desktops/laptops, aarch64 for ARM systems like Raspberry Pi 4/5). Extract with tar xzf ChromIQ-Linux-*.tar.gz, then run ./ChromIQ/ChromIQ. Requires ArgyllCMS — install via your package manager (sudo apt install argyll) or from argyllcms.com/downloadlinux.html.
☕ ChromIQ is free and always will be — if it saves you time or ink, a coffee is a kind way to say thanks. Completely optional, and the app stays fully featured either way.