Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: Athena on March 08, 2011, 03:18:28 am
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(My understanding of color management is rather limited. I am working on it. :) )
Since getting my PA271W, I have noticed that some images on the web look horribly red or magenta saturated. I alternated between being very worried about my own monitor and thinking that the photographers of said images had edited the images on very poorly calibrated monitors.
But it's happened too may times, so today I did some reading and learned (?) that the problem is that my color managed browser (Safari) and my Mac computer are displaying untagged images with my monitor profile rather than sRGB. And that the solution is to use Firefox with the color management value set to =1. This apparently makes FF display untagged images as sRGB.
So I did this and sure enough, one of the images I was seeing in Safari as overly red saturated displays in FF much, much better now. I downloaded that image and pulled it into PS and sure enough, it has no color profile attached. If I proof it as monitor RGB, I see the same over red saturated image I see in Safari.
Is it not possible for me to use Safari to see untagged images properly (as sRGB) on the web? Am I stuck with having to use FF now because I have a wide gamut monitor and a mac?
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Is it not possible for me to use Safari to see untagged images properly (as sRGB) on the web? Am I stuck with having to use FF now because I have a wide gamut monitor and a mac?
I'm not an experienced Safari user, but I see nothing in its Preferences which allows this - perhaps some third party Extensions are available which do it. But the basic problem is with the content. I ran into a similar problem after receiving complaints about how one of my images appeared in Safari, opened the up-loaded file and realized it was untagged. Embedding it with sRGB, Black Point Compensation enabled, fixed it immediately. I use Firefox as my default browser anyhow. Works fine.
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Mark - to force FF to display untagged images as sRGB you have to change the color management value from 0 to 1.
This is a bit of a problem for me as I am expected to critique others' images online. If I can't see them well, my comments could be worthless. :(
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Mark - to force FF to display untagged images as sRGB you have to change the color management value from 0 to 1.
This is a bit of a problem for me as I am expected to critique others' images online. If I can't see them well, my comments could be worthless. :(
Sure, but, unless I'm misunderstanding something - once you change that option from 0 to 1 in FF, you ARE seeing the images correctly, isn't it?
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On my wide gamut NEC, an untagged Adobe RGB (1998) doc in Safari looks just like the tagged doc in Photoshop. I can’t get the latest version of FireFox to open this image (bug?) although it opens smaller screen captures saved as TIFFs. And my LR web galleries look identical in Safari and FireFox (these are using Flash, what version I don’t know).
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On my wide gamut NEC, an untagged Adobe RGB (1998) doc in Safari looks just like the tagged doc in Photoshop. I can’t get the latest version of FireFox to open this image (bug?) although it opens smaller screen captures saved as TIFFs. And my LR web galleries look identical in Safari and FireFox (these are using Flash, what version I don’t know).
Really interesting Andrew, because I've had problems with colour consistency between Flash galleries in Firefox and how they appear in LR, which does not happen with HTML galleries between those two environments.
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Really interesting Andrew, because I've had problems with colour consistency between Flash galleries in Firefox and how they appear in LR, which does not happen with HTML galleries between those two environments.
I know Flash 10 is color managed so I’m assuming whatever LR 3 is writing is color managed too.
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Really interesting Andrew, because I've had problems with colour consistency between Flash galleries in Firefox and how they appear in LR, which does not happen with HTML galleries between those two environments.
Most definitely. My photographs with embedded sRGB tags that are in my Flash-based web site look oversaturated on a wide gamut monitor, with all browsers, and yet on a "regular" monitor like my wife's Apple Cinema Display they look fine. Tough choice between the evils. Edit the files to look good on a wide gamut monitor and have them look undersaturated in the web site on my most monitors, or edit them to look good on most monitors but oversaturated on wide gamut monitors.
My understanding is that the problem is with the color management capabilities(or lack therof) in Adobe Flash.
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Is it not possible for me to use Safari to see untagged images properly (as sRGB) on the web?
No you can't.
I am not a Mac user, but I know that if image is untagged no color management is performed from Safari (or monitor profile is assumed for the image ==> same result).
I think this is not the best choice.
Jacopo
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Safari assumes untagged data is in the display color space and uses that profile. In fact OS X does this throughout (be nice if like the old days, you could set it for sRGB but that’s not possible).
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Most definitely. My photographs with embedded sRGB tags that are in my Flash-based web site look oversaturated on a wide gamut monitor, with all browsers, and yet on a "regular" monitor like my wife's Apple Cinema Display they look fine. Tough choice between the evils. Edit the files to look good on a wide gamut monitor and have them look undersaturated in the web site on my most monitors, or edit them to look good on most monitors but oversaturated on wide gamut monitors.
My understanding is that the problem is with the color management capabilities(or lack therof) in Adobe Flash.
My understanding is the same and I have been advised to circumvent this by using HTML galleries instead. However, perhaps the most recent version of Flash has dealt with these issues. I'll need to retest at some point.
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My understanding is the same and I have been advised to circumvent this by using HTML galleries instead. However, perhaps the most recent version of Flash has dealt with these issues. I'll need to retest at some point.
Now that I look farther, that may be the case. I just viewed a Flash LR gallery and at the same time, viewed one of the images in Photoshop and they DO NOT match! I downloaded the images and they are tagged in sRGB. When in Safari, I select “About Flash” it tells me its v10. But I don’t know if LR is using that when it builds the gallery. So HTML galleries look to be the safer bet for the time being. I wonder if differing LR templates that use Flash are different?
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So in LRs Web module, indeed the images preview differently if you select HTML vs. Flash! If you select Flash, they do not match previews in other modules. Never noticed it till today. That’s not good (Adobe should pop a warning here). So what I see in the web module matches what I see on the web, but not elsewhere. Mumble, mumble...
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So in LRs Web module, indeed the images preview differently if you select HTML vs. Flash! If you select Flash, they do not match previews in other modules. Never noticed it till today. That’s not good (Adobe should pop a warning here). So what I see in the web module matches what I see on the web, but not elsewhere. Mumble, mumble...
Adobe is well aware of this issue and the simple answer is - on good authority as recently as December '10 - that LR Flash galleries are not colour-managed from LR 3 at all, so even using a recent version of Flash (10.x) all bets are off. In light of the fact that Adobe owns both Flash and LR3, one would hope this kind of thing would get into sync some time soon. I don't know priority they're assigning to fixing it.
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So Mark, its the flash gallery itself that doesn’t have the correct ‘tag’ or code (AS 3)? And once ‘fixed’ all wide gamut display users would see the content correctly? IOW, its not necessary for end users to have Flash 10 updated, its the way the gallery is built from LR right?
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So Mark, its the flash gallery itself that doesn’t have the correct ‘tag’ or code (AS 3)? And once ‘fixed’ all wide gamut display users would see the content correctly? IOW, its not necessary for end users to have Flash 10 updated, its the way the gallery is built from LR right?
That's pretty much how I would interpret what I was told. And I would think it logical that once this is fixed in LR3, as long as sRGB+BPC is embedded, the image should render correctly on any properly colour-managed display whether it is wide-gamut or not.
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That's pretty much how I would interpret what I was told. And I would think it logical that once this is fixed in LR3, as long as sRGB+BPC is embedded, the image should render correctly on any properly colour-managed display whether it is wide-gamut or not.
That's not going to help those who use Flash sites designed by others where you drop your images into the template. For example, LiveBooks and FolioLink. I spoke with the guy responsible for writing the Flash code for FolioLink about this issue last Spring and he had no idea what I was talking about or how to address it.
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That's not going to help those who use Flash sites designed by others where you drop your images into the template. For example, LiveBooks and FolioLink. I spoke with the guy responsible for writing the Flash code for FolioLink about this issue last Spring and he had no idea what I was talking about or how to address it.
There must be such services who understand the fundamentals.
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So in LRs Web module, indeed the images preview differently if you select HTML vs. Flash! If you select Flash, they do not match previews in other modules. Never noticed it till today. That’s not good (Adobe should pop a warning here). So what I see in the web module matches what I see on the web, but not elsewhere. Mumble, mumble...
This and other issues have existed with the Flash module ever since I started using LR two years ago (plus, although Flash is thought to be ubiquitous one cannot be assured of a viewer having it loaded on his/her computer). I've stuck with HTML galleries and the colors are a match from what I see in LR. There are other issues however if your webhost uses Windows server as the LR code needs to be modified.
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There must be such services who understand the fundamentals.
I tend to doubt it. LiveBooks and FolioLink are among the biggest and most sophisticated web hosting/design firms for photographers.
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Since you have a PA271W, I'd recommend the following. If you go for lengths of time where all of your work is in Photoshop, etc., and then other periods where you are on the web, doing non-photo stuff, and there is very little overlap between the two, then I'd recommend you set up an sRGB profile as well as a wide-gamut one and just toggle back and forth between the two as needed. If you have Spectraview, you can do it there, or you can do it through Multiprofiler or the panel controls if you don't. This works for me because I tend to work on photos for a couple hours at a time a couple times a week. The rest of the week the monitor can live in sRGB since I'm not doing photo stuff. It takes about 20 seconds to switch profiles.
If you need to be in wide-gamut mode all the time, well that's a different matter. As you've found out, Safari displays non-tagged images in monitor RGB, so a non-tagged sRGB image is going to be too saturated. It's a shame there's not a default 'assume non-tagged images as' setting or override. All I can say is that maybe it's best to treat the web as not color accurate. If you really need to judge an image from the web, save it to the desktop and then pop it open in a color aware application like Photoshop.
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I do similar. on my PA241, when I'm using it for normal stuff, I have 1 setting (via Multiprofiler) and when I delve into LR/PS, I switch to different luminance and other settings.