An Honest Comparison
If you're looking at professional display calibration software, you may be weighing up ColourSpace from Light Illusion against Calman from Portrait Displays. It's worth being clear about why Calman is on that list at all. It is heavily marketed, and widely seeded through free licences to bloggers, YouTubers and the trade press - so you'll have seen the name. Visibility and capability are not the same thing, and this page sets the two products side by side on what actually matters: the calibration result. We've kept it factual. We've not pretended we don't have a view.
Calman started as a manual-adjustment tool for home cinema enthusiasts, with no 3D LUT support at all. When we released LightSpace CMS - ColourSpace's predecessor - Calman was still a manual-only product. They later added LUT calibration, initially via iterative re-measurement (the same approach as their autocal), and have since gone through several colour engines. The most recent, announced in 2021, is called the Aurora Color Engine, and Portrait Displays' own press release said it works "for specific displays". We thought that was an interesting thing to admit about a colour engine.
ColourSpace was designed as professional colour management from day one. One advanced volumetric engine, one integrated profile, works correctly on every LUT-capable display we've ever pointed it at - reference monitors, consumer TVs, projectors, LED walls, RGB-laser cinema. One purchase. Free updates for life. No annual fees.
Hundreds of Calman users have switched to ColourSpace. To our knowledge, no ColourSpace user has ever switched the other way. We've asked.
The 333 Question
Calman's internal 3D LUT is 333. Across every edition, including Ultimate. It always has been.
If Calman exports a 653 or 1293 LUT, the file is bigger - but the underlying LUT data is still 333, extrapolated mathematically up to the larger size. The file impresses; the LUT does not.
ColourSpace has no internal cap. 2563 is in routine use, and 10243 has been tested and verified to work. The practical ceiling is the host PC's CPU power, thread count and memory - not anything baked into the software.
This is the LUT size, by the way. It has nothing to do with the patch count used for measurement - nobody measures tens of thousands of patches; the display would drift halfway through and invalidate the result. Anyone telling you Calman measures more patches than ColourSpace is, kindly, confused.
The Aurora Color Engine
In 2021 Portrait Displays announced Calman's new Aurora Color Engine with support for "specific displays". As we said earlier, a colour engine that only works on specific displays is telling you something important about the engine.
Aurora's actual trick, on closer inspection, is to separate the grey-scale measurement from the volumetric colour measurement during calibration. The grey-scale measurement gets the careful treatment; the volumetric measurement gets less. Most users spot banding and inaccuracy on the grey scale - they're trained to look there - but miss the same problems in the volumetric colour because that's harder to assess by eye. The result looks better than it is.
ColourSpace does not do this. We use a single integrated profile with one engine. We have nothing to hide.
What ColourSpace does do, which is genuinely different, is let the user independently configure the grey-axis patch count and the volumetric Body-Centred Cube (BCC) patch count within a single coherent profile. So a 14 BCC volumetric (~4,941 patches) can pair with 64 grey-axis patches, or 101, or whatever the display actually needs. The user decides where to allocate measurement effort. The two sets are part of the same profile, not separate datasets bolted together.
See Steve's commentary on the Aurora announcement for the full version of this point.
Architecture, Precision and Speed
Several separate things are true here, and each stands on its own.
ColourSpace is a native x64 application; Calman remains Win32. The x64 architecture removes Win32 memory constraints - making native LUT generation at 10243 and beyond possible.
Rounding errors reduced to virtually zero. Double precision (64-bit floating point) processing is expected of any modern calibration system - Calman has it too. What is not expected is what the ColourSpace Colour Engine builds on top of it: rounding errors reduced to virtually zero across the entire calibration pipeline, from profile data through volumetric calculation to final LUT generation. That is separate engineering work, not a free side-effect of using Doubles.
Colour accuracy over mathematical accuracy. An error that is mathematically equal across all three colour channels is not perceptually equal - human vision is far more sensitive to Green, which dominates our perception of brightness, and dE metrics are weighted the same way. The ColourSpace Colour Engine resolves residual errors based on how colour is actually seen, rather than treating the three channels as numerically equivalent, with the result being directly measurable: lower final dE errors in the verified calibration result.
Calman has no native bit depth capability beyond 8-bit. Calman's Sony multi-point autocal cannot correctly address Sony's control points, because those are defined in 10-bit. And while the Calman integration within Resolve supports 10-bit patch generation, Calman itself cannot use it - ColourSpace can, via the CS Patch Translator addon, happily driving Calman's own Resolve integration at the 10-bit accuracy Calman can't reach.
And then there is speed. The x64 transition brings ColourSpace a processing speed increase of typically 5% to 30% or more, depending on the function being performed - on top of an engine that is processing full bit depth data and generating LUTs up to 10243 and beyond. Calman is exceptionally slow despite working at far lower bit depth and LUT resolution.
Autocal vs Iterate Parameter
Calman's autocal is automated manual adjustment, via TV-manufacturer API access. ColourSpace has the same underlying capability built in - we call it Iterate Parameter, because that's what autocal actually is.
It's not exposed in the regular ColourSpace UI because we don't think automated manual adjustment is a particularly good way to calibrate a TV. The autocal approach produces nice low dE numbers but real-world artefacts on actual content - user feedback on this has been consistent across the industry for years. We'd rather give people the best possible manual calibration tools and the most advanced 3D LUT calibration. So we have.
The Iterate Parameter capability is held back pending the TV-manufacturer API access we'd need to make it work end-to-end. With major retail chains looking to adopt ColourSpace those API agreements are likely sooner rather than later.
Closed vs Open
Calman is a deliberately closed system. Data file formats are encoded specifically to prevent sharing. Hardware integration is restricted to Portrait Displays' own re-badged products. Third-party development is not supported.
ColourSpace is fully open. All data file formats are human-readable. Third-party plugin development is actively supported, and a healthy ecosystem of community plugins already exists - including JVC, Sony and Epson projector integration that the core application doesn't ship with, the Spyder24_4_CS probe addon, the CS Patch Translator, an LG White Balance GUI, and several others. See ColourSpace Addons.
One practical consequence: with ColourSpace, the calibration data you generate today is still readable and usable in ten years' time. With Calman, it's whatever Portrait Displays decides it should be.
The C6 Probe and the G1 Generator
The Calman C6 probe is the OEM version of the i1Display Pro with a Portrait Displays paint job, sold at considerably higher prices. Same electronics, same capability, gaudier housing. The same OEM probe is sold by Dell, among others, considerably cheaper. Older C6 probes have been modified by third parties to work with ColourSpace; the latest version cannot, but we will happily support yours either way. We just won't sell you another one.
The Calman G1 pattern generator is a Portrait Displays clone of the free open-source PGenerator software. PGenerator runs on Raspberry Pi; the G1 runs on a different ARM single-board computer (the ROC-RK3328-PC). It is not a rebadge; it is a separate, less capable product built on the same idea, sold at a high price. Reported G1 issues include 6-7 second delays per patch in HDR (a real problem given HDR-induced display drift) and random patch value changes at different resolutions. Portrait Displays removed PGenerator support from Calman to require users to purchase the G1.
ColourSpace supports PGenerator directly on Raspberry Pi, along with Murideo SIX-G and SEVEN-G, DVDO AVLab TPG, AJA ColorBox, AccuPel, Lumagen Radiance, madVR Envy, Videworks Tetratune, IS-mini, software TPGs including our own Calibration Client, Dogegen and PatternSpace, direct HDMI from the ColourSpace machine, and the ColourSpace internal pattern generator. We have, you'll notice, options.
Cost of Ownership
Calman All Access is Portrait Displays' annual maintenance fee, required on Calman Studio and Ultimate to keep receiving software updates beyond the first year. If a subscription lapses, the user typically has to pay for the missed years to reinstate.
ColourSpace has no equivalent. Updates are free for the life of the product, with no annual fee, no subscription, and no reinstatement charge. ColourSpace's predecessor LightSpace CMS has had over a decade of continuous free updates on the same basis. We've also, to be transparent, never charged any customer for support beyond the first year - after the initial flurry of questions immediately following purchase, the workflow becomes intuitive enough that further support is typically not required.
Over a five-year ownership period, Calman Studio and Ultimate accumulate substantial recurring fees. Calman Home requires full re-purchase annually to remain current. ColourSpace is a single line item with no recurring fees.
And if you're not sure: ColourSpace Rental lets you try the full software for 5 days at any licence level. If you buy within 10 days of the rental, the rental cost is refunded against the full licence price - making the rental effectively free if you decide to purchase.
Operating Systems
Portrait Displays have published a paper confirming that Calman cannot be used on Mac at all - not even via Bootcamp or virtualisation.
ColourSpace runs on Windows, and runs on macOS via Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. A native macOS version is in development and genuinely near release this time. For users on Apple Silicon needing professional calibration today, ColourSpace via Parallels is the only working option of the two products.
Neither product runs natively on Linux. Our Java-based Calibration Client TPG does, so a Linux machine can be a networked pattern-generation node in a ColourSpace workflow.
Workflow: The Real Question
The substantive difference between the two products, beneath all the technical specifics, is how each system treats its users.
Calman has a prescriptive, step-by-step workflow approach. The user is walked through a sequence of fixed steps. The system holds your hand. When everything fits the workflow, this works fine. When it doesn't, you're stuck - because the system is built around the assumption that you don't need to understand what's actually happening. Multiple users have described it variously as treating them "like a baby" and as "Calibration for Dummies".
ColourSpace assumes you want to learn the craft. The workflow is freeform. You combine the tools that fit the display in front of you - Hint, Drift, Augment, Pre-Roll, Stabilisation, Active LUT, Reduced-Gamut and Focused Patch Sets, Sub-Space profiling, Point Adjust, Custom Filters - and you make the calibration decisions. This requires more from the user. It also produces calibrators who can solve their own problems and produce reliably accurate results on displays Calman can't handle at all.
The Light Illusion support style follows the same philosophy. We educate rather than spoon-feed. Often we'll point you at the relevant guide, or ask the question that lets you work the answer out yourself. We don't give "do this, then do that" instructions, because dependent users fall over when the instruction doesn't fit the situation. We're not trying to be unhelpful. We're trying to make you a better calibrator.
If that's not the kind of relationship you want with your calibration software, Calman is genuinely a more comfortable choice. If you want to actually get good at this, ColourSpace is what you want.
What the Users Say
We don't give free ColourSpace licences to anyone with a YouTube channel or who publishes display reviews, the way Calman does. That's a marketing strategy and we've chosen not to use it. The result is that reviewers tend to default to Calman because Calman is what they have. We'd rather you read what people who actually paid for ColourSpace say about it.
A selection from the unsolicited user comments thread on our forums and the ongoing AVS Forum ColourSpace thread:
"ColourSpace won by a mile." - on a direct 213 LUT comparison on LG OLED, full-day side-by-side test
"Your LUTs kick their ass on non-linear displays." - professional calibrator
"I bought HTP a few days after buying Calman Ultimate, after reading about ColourSpace and realising that Calman has a totally different approach that would seem to produce lower quality results."
"AutoCal produced nice numbers with low dE's but more or less artefacts with real material - LightSpace and later ColourSpace solved that problem."
"This just blows Calman away on so many levels."
"It's noticeably snappier on my laptop than Calman." - ex-Calman Ultimate user
"Calman's workflows are rigid - if you want to do anything outside of the workflow they establish, you have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops."
"I must admit I thought I was a good calibrator, ColourSpace has sent me straight back to school. This is a good thing." - professional calibrator
AV Magazine independently noted in their i1Display Pro review that ColourSpace "manages the probe significantly more efficiently than the competition, thanks to an excellent implementation of the official SDK."
Summary
ColourSpace and Calman are both professional display calibration systems. They differ on architecture, engine accuracy, workflow philosophy, hardware integration, OS support and cost.
- 3D LUT: ColourSpace native to 10243 tested, 2563 in routine use; Calman internal 333 across all tiers, with mathematical extrapolation for larger exports.
- Engine architecture: ColourSpace single integrated volumetric engine with independent grey-axis and BCC volumetric patch counts; Calman's current engines are single-measurement-per-patch with Aurora workaround that separates grey scale from volumetric colour to hide engine limitations.
- Architecture & precision: ColourSpace native x64, with rounding errors reduced to virtually zero and residual errors resolved for colour accuracy rather than purely mathematical accuracy; Calman remains Win32, with no native bit depth capability beyond 8-bit.
- Speed: ColourSpace x64 is typically 5% to 30% or more faster, while processing full bit depth data and LUTs to 10243 and beyond; Calman is exceptionally slow despite far lower bit depth and LUT resolution.
- Operating systems: ColourSpace Windows, with macOS via Parallels (and native macOS near release); Calman Windows only.
- Pricing model: ColourSpace single purchase with free updates for life; Calman annual All Access maintenance fees on Studio and Ultimate, full re-purchase annually for Home.
- Workflow: ColourSpace freeform with composable tools; Calman prescriptive workflow steps.
- Hardware ecosystem: ColourSpace fully open with active third-party plugin ecosystem; Calman closed, with Portrait Displays' own re-badged hardware.
- Data formats: ColourSpace human-readable, future-proof; Calman encoded to prevent sharing.
- Support model: ColourSpace educates; Calman scripts.
If you're choosing today, the right comparison is on these dimensions and against your own needs - not against marketing copy or YouTube reviews from people who got their licence free.
If you'd like to try ColourSpace before committing, the Rental option gets you the full software for 5 days, with the rental cost refunded against your eventual purchase if you go ahead within 10 days.