Save for web. Any reason why anybody would save without color profile checked?

[sanfairyanne]

For a long time I've accidentally saved photographs for web with the Photoshop color profile check box unchecked. Un-beknown to me the images were saved without the Srgb color profile. This meant that different browsers have to guess at the images color profile. I now have to removed two dozen images from my website and make corrections. It's my fault of course, but I have to wonder why on earth there's a check box at all. Surely nobody ever saves a web image without a color profile. It's frustrating to think people may well have been looking at my images and thought they looked terrible.

Perhaps somebody here knows why there's an option for this, surely it should be on by default.

[pegelli]

I'm not entirely sure, but if there is no colour space included I think most web browsers will assume it's sRGB.

[digitaldog]

The reason one might not want to embed the profile is because it takes up all of 4K of space within the image but if you have thousands of images, that ads up. Further, many browsers don't look for embedded profiles and assume sRGB anyway. Should the check box be ON by default? Yes I think it should; untagged data is RGB mystery meat. It's sticky so turning it off the first time, assuming you don't want that 4K in each image, would do the trick. In the newer Export to web, initially there wasn't even an option to embed sRGB until a lot of folks complained rightfully so.

[Simon Garrett]

Just to add: most browsers don't assume sRGB.  They should, but they don't.  The simply don't colour-manage if there is no embedded profile.

With Firefox, there is at least the option to make it assume sRGB if there is no embedded profile (set gfx.color_management.mode to 1, the default is 2.  Put "about:config" without the quotes in Firefox's URL bar to alter system settings).

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... different browsers have to guess at the images color profile...

Not really. If you converted to sRGB (as you should), it doesn't really matter if you embed it or not. All and any browser, color managed or not, would display it the same.

[fdisilvestro]

I would say it is a legacy issue. For many years browsers were not color managed (Chrome for Windows was finally color managed in late 2012), internet connection speeds were slower and bandwidth was expensive. I have been involved in web sites since late 1990s and everything you could strip off your content you would do to make your pages as light as possible

[Simon Garrett]

Not really. If you converted to sRGB (as you should), it doesn't really matter if you embed it or not. All and any browser, color managed or not, would display it the same.

I don't think that's correct except for monitors with a colour space equal to sRGB. 

Most browsers colour-manage images containing embedded profiles, but they don't colour-manage images that do not contain embedded profiles.  That's not the same as assuming sRGB, they simply don't colour manage images that don't have embedded profiles. 

If you have a standard-gamut monitor with a colour space close to sRGB, then colour-managing an sRGB image is pretty much a null conversion.  As a result, not colour-managing an sRGB image means that it will look approximately the same anyway. 

However, if you have a wide-gamut monitor, then sRGB images will be greatly over-saturated if not colour-managed.   

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... if you have a wide-gamut monitor, then sRGB images will be greatly over-saturated if not colour-managed.   

Yes, I forgot about a few freakaratties* But even then, don't such monitors have an sRGB mode precisely for going online (instead of soft proofing)?

*Relax, guys, just a joke

[digitaldog]

Not really. If you converted to sRGB (as you should), it doesn't really matter if you embed it or not. All and any browser, color managed or not, would display it the same.

I don't think so. If the browser is not color managed, the RGB values go directly to the display. If the browser is color managed and knows or assumes sRGB (and the data IS sRGB), then the display profile is used for the preview. Yes, with sRGB, non color managed browsers may not produce a bad result but it's really not the same as a browser that understands the scale of the numbers and uses the display profile to render those values. So it does matter.

[Tim Lookingbill]

Not embedding the profile even with sRGB-ish displays vs browsers that assume sRGB can mean the difference between whether skin tones are slightly jaundice and cobalt blue skies look a bit cyan or with a slant toward green.

In other words it can screw up the color tables of an image in unpredictably varying ways.