ColorChecker Passport Problem

And a fix! Read on…

I have been using my ColorChecker Passport for quite a while and until now the software has not failed me. I wanted to calibrate my camera for a particular light and followed the regular procedure:

1. Take a photograph of the ColorChecker Passport
2. Import to Lightroom
3. Right-click, and select to export to ColorChecker Passport

And it would tell you that the profile was successfully created and Lightroom would recognize it after a restart. But, instead I had a flashing screen, which appeared to be a command prompt screen in Windows 7 and I saw an error message on the left. After a couple of more failures, I decided to uninstall and reinstall the software thinking that it might have somehow gotten corrupted. That did not help the problem.

Then I asked “Uncle Google” and read up on the X-Rite support site but could not find anything resembling my problem. It was time to call the big guns, I wrote a message to my friend Brenda Hipsher who oversees the X-Rite social media and the X-Rite Blog. She thought it was a strange problem and suggested that I write to X-Rite support with full documentation, which I did on Friday.

This morning there was a message from X-Rite support which said “Based on the support issue you submitted,  we have attached a PDF file of a Knowledge Base Article as a potential solution.” I opened the PDF file, followed the simple steps, lo and behold program started working like magic. In case you may have a similar problem, I am sharing the steps necessary to fix it. Keep in mind that my problem was that not only the plugin was not working but I could not even start the Passport.exe from the desktop. If your problem is similar to mine you may follow the steps below. They do not do anything drastic and can easily be reversed if it does not solve your problem. Here are the simple steps that resolved my problem (and the official X-Rite page which repeats the same information):

1. Open control panel and select System
2. Click on the Advanced tab
3. Click on the Environment Variables button at the bottom of the window
4. Under System Variables click the New button
5. For Variable Name type KMP_DUPLICATE_LIB_OK
6. For Variable Value type TRUE
7. Click OK and close all the windows

That’s it! All tech support problems should be this quick to resolve. Thank you X-Rite, thank you Mary DeCator.