Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: Jonathan Wienke on September 05, 2008, 06:59:04 am
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Been playing with Chrome and like it so far. Does anyone know it it is color managed?
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Been playing with Chrome and like it so far. Does anyone know it it is color managed?
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Unfortunately, it's not color managed. I hate that trend.
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Response withdrawn
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Firefox 3 is the only fully colour managed browser out there just now.
One way to test a browser's colour management capabilities is to visit this site: http://color.org/version4html.xalter (http://color.org/version4html.xalter)
However, this only tests to see if the browser supports tagged images. Safari passes this test, but it will only colour manage tagged images.
Firefox on the other-hand, treats untagged images, HTML colour codes etc. as sRGB and colour manages the whole browsing experience.
To enable colour management in v3, type in about:config in the address bar.
Search for color and set gfx.color_management.enabled to true.
Restart the browser and colour management should be enabled using your display profile.
Colour management will noticeably slow down the browser by about 10–20% on most systems, which is why it is disabled by default, and why Chrome doesn't have it. (Chrome is built for speed over everything else)
Firefox 3.1 alpha adds additional options, letting you choose between no colour management, applying it to tagged images only, or to everything.
There are also options to change from the default perceptual rendering intent to relative, saturation and absolute rendering intents.
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I believe that Safari is color managed as well and has been for some time. Not sure about Opera.
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I believe that Safari is color managed as well and has been for some time. Not sure about Opera.
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Safari only supports colour management with tagged images. Untagged images (the majority on the internet), HTML coded colours etc. are not colour managed at all, whereas Firefox treats them as sRGB.
As far as I know, Firefox 3 and Safari are the only colour-managed browsers on Windows.
On OSX, Firefox 3, Safari, WebKit, OmniWeb, Internet Explorer (now obsolete) and possibly others support colour management, but only Firefox has full colour management for browsing, rather than just tagged images.
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Firefox on the other-hand, treats untagged images, HTML colour codes etc. as sRGB and colour manages the whole browsing experience.
I don't think this is quite correct. FireFox seems to treat HTML color codes and non-image data as if it were in Monitor RGB, not sRGB. This won't be noticeable on most monitors, but if you have a wide-gamut display the colors on web pages are off. I find it pretty annoying, and it's whyI continue to use IE7 when not critically viewing photos (I prefer the oversaturation of IE7 to the hue shifts in FF3).
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Firefox 3 is the only fully colour managed browser out there just now.
One way to test a browser's colour management capabilities is to visit this site: http://color.org/version4html.xalter (http://color.org/version4html.xalter)
However, this only tests to see if the browser supports tagged images. Safari passes this test, but it will only colour manage tagged images.
Firefox on the other-hand, treats untagged images, HTML colour codes etc. as sRGB and colour manages the whole browsing experience.
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I'll admit I'm no color expert, but I'm not sure why Firefox treating untagged images as sRGB is better, and in fact in my mind seems illogical and incorrect.
If a file on the web is untagged, it seems the most appropriate thing to do is leave it alone. You can't color manage a document on the fly if you don't know it's color space. It seems a more logical assumption for the browser to make is the image was designed to display in a non color managed environment, such as IE, so the best thing to do is treat it the same way as IE would ... do nothing.
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I don't think this is quite correct. FireFox seems to treat HTML color codes and non-image data as if it were in Monitor RGB, not sRGB. This won't be noticeable on most monitors, but if you have a wide-gamut display the colors on web pages are off. I find it pretty annoying, and it's whyI continue to use IE7 when not critically viewing photos (I prefer the oversaturation of IE7 to the hue shifts in FF3).[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=219831\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
I'm on OSX (don't think that should matter) using the Firefox 3.1 alpha right now rather than 3.0, but I'm almost certain that it handles images the same as 3.0 by default. As far as I know, the only change is the additional options to switch between partial/full management and change rendering intent from perceptual.
I created three versions of the same photo—an untagged image, an image tagged with sRGB (from a P&S so it's ‘natively’ sRGB) and one tagged with my monitor profile. (not converted, tagged with it)
In Firefox, the untagged and sRGB images look identical, whereas the image that has my monitor profile attached is noticeably different.
In Safari, the sRGB tagged image looks the same as it does in Firefox, and the untagged/monitor profile images look identical—as expected.
If you treat an image (or HTML colours) as being tagged with the monitor profile, it's essentially the same as not being colour managed at all.
While it does use perceptual rendering by default rather than relative colorimetric as Photoshop does, it should be significantly better than not being managed at all.
I'll admit I'm no color expert, but I'm not sure why Firefox treating untagged images as sRGB is better, and in fact in my mind seems illogical and incorrect.
If a file on the web is untagged, it seems the most appropriate thing to do is leave it alone. You can't color manage a document on the fly if you don't know it's color space. It seems a more logical assumption for the browser to make is the image was designed to display in a non color managed environment, such as IE, so the best thing to do is treat it the same way as IE would ... do nothing.[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=219908\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Well, there are a number of issues. First of all, Windows, OSX etc. are all designed around sRGB. So to have HTML colours looking the same across systems, you need to treat them as having an sRGB profile. If not, you end up with very different looks depending on what display you are using. We're no longer all using CRTs that were at least all fairly close to the sRGB gamut, we now have laptop displays with smaller gamuts and LCDs with much wider gamuts that result in extremely oversaturated colour. Applying colour management and treating the web as sRGB (as it is supposed to be) avoids that problem.
Secondly, probably the majority of people out there on the web, don't know a thing about colour management and probably aren't even going to be using colour managed applications. They'll be editing photos from P&S cameras (sRGB) or creating computer generated images for the web are supposed to be sRGB just like HTML colours.
Many applications when exporting for the web, tend to strip out colour profiles completely along with EXIF data, to save on space. Even Photoshop will automatically convert your images to sRGB (in CS3), strip out the metadata and leave the images untagged by default when saving for the web.
This often leads to the question “Why don't my images look the same online as they do in Photoshop?” which can lead to people editing their images to “look right on the web”.
Unfortunately, with this editing, all they are doing is editing the image to look good on their display — it's going to look totally different on another monitor with a wider/narrower gamut than the one they are using.
If you use Firefox with colour management enabled to view these images, they do look the same as they did in Photoshop. (well, very similar, rendering intent/colour engine aside)
There have also been complaints in the past where people are creating websites and wonder why their images for the page (buttons etc) don't blend in with the HTML colour in partially managed browsers. This was particularly an issue with PNGs, with most people resorting to stripping out the embedded information to avoid it. The better solution, rather than removing profile information from the images, is to apply colour management to the web page itself to have things match up accurately instead.
Unmanaged on a wide gamut display, virtually everything you see on the web will be oversaturated, with only properly tagged images looking as they should in a partially colour-managed browser, and probably looking rather under-saturated in comparison. Certainly, there are going to be cases where an image should not be treated as being sRGB, but almost all of the time when that is the case, it will be tagged with the appropriate profile. (e.g. Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB)
I think it is a much safer bet to assume that all images/colour on the web is supposed to be sRGB than to avoid colour managing things at all and viewing everything oversaturated.
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I'll admit I'm no color expert, but I'm not sure why Firefox treating untagged images as sRGB is better, and in fact in my mind seems illogical and incorrect.
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The simple answer, same as the previous poster, is that sRGB is the standard colourspace for the World Wide Web as specified by W3C and numerous other standards bodies. The specification assumes that all images will be transmitted without any profile or tagging information (particularly for small images of 1-2Kbytes) to minimise continuous retransmission of the same informaton with each image. This has a big impact on low bit rate connections to the internet (e.g. dial-up). It's perhaps less of an issue these days with where the Metadata forms less of a percentage of the file size and more bandwidth is available.
[a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRGB]sRGB on Wikipedia[/url]
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Safari/OSX has a quirk with wide gamut monitors. As others have said, it manages tagged images perfectly well.
If an image is untagged, then the monitor profile will be applied to the image. Since most monitors show roughly the sRGB color space this is not a problem. On wide gamut monitors (such as my Nec 2690) you are essentially taking what is likely an sRGB image from the web and tagging it with the Adobe1998 space. This makes for very vivid and saturated web viewing. Fun, but not at all accurate.
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(http://imagesbymurray.com/ll-images/bgrredducatiwcstesttrisiz5.jpg)
This image is purposely desgned to indicate how the viewing application handles the embedded profile. An explanation at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/color_blog/ (http://blogs.msdn.com/color_blog/)
-John
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Super way to determine how things are handled. Thanks for sharing, John.