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Author Topic: Wide Gamut Displays and web color  (Read 23514 times)

Arlen

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Wide Gamut Displays and web color
« Reply #20 on: September 10, 2009, 02:47:43 am »

I think the answer to your problem is in the link I gave you in my last reply, if you read it carefully. Here's what I think is going on.

The example image on your computer is in sRGB, and it is TAGGED. Firefox 3.5.2, and Safari, are color managed browsers that recognize the tag--and just like Photoshop, they display it correctly on any monitor.

That same example image in sRGB was stripped of its tag when it was uploaded to the web, so it is now UNTAGGED. The Windows operating system assumes untagged images are in sRGB space, so they display correctly in a color managed browser. But the Mac operating system assumes untagged images are in your monitor's color space, and assigns your monitor's profile--in the case of your calibrated wide-gamut monitor, close to Adobe RGB 1998. The browser displays them as if you had (incorrectly) assigned an aRGB tag.

You can test this by opening your example image in PS, then saving a JPEG version in which you uncheck the box beside "ICC profile: sRGB...", so that the tag is stripped. Now drag that untagged image onto your Firefox or Safari icon; it will probably look the same as the version on your web site:  oversaturated.

If this is indeed the case, there seems currently to be no solution. Images that are in sRGB but are untagged will display incorrectly on wide gamut monitors under the Mac operating system. You can make sure that images on your own web site look OK by always keeping them tagged. But you can't control what others do, and most web images are untagged, so they won't look right in your browser on your monitor.
« Last Edit: September 10, 2009, 02:50:21 am by Arlen »
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digitaldog

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« Reply #21 on: September 10, 2009, 09:58:12 am »

Quote from: Arlen
If this is indeed the case, there seems currently to be no solution.

You are correct, it is indeed the case and there's no solution. Its too bad Apple didn't change the behavior in Snow Leopard of using the display profile as the untagged assumption or better, like older versions of the OS, allowed us to set via the ColorSync utility what assumption we wish to use.
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jerryrock

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« Reply #22 on: September 10, 2009, 11:11:12 am »

One solution would be to utilize a wide gamut monitor capable of switching between calibrated profiles. Then you could use sRGB for web viewing and get accurate colors.
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Arlen

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« Reply #23 on: September 10, 2009, 11:58:06 am »

Quote from: jerryrock
One solution would be to utilize a wide gamut monitor capable of switching between calibrated profiles. Then you could use sRGB for web viewing and get accurate colors.

I meant there's no solution that would provide a complete fix, i.e., while using the monitor in wide-gamut mode. But yes, with an sRGB-profiled monitor, untagged sRGB images would appear closer to the way they do in PS. That may be the best approach for those using a Mac, until Apple possibly changes the way untagged images are handled in some future release of the OS. But if you do a lot of work both on the web and in PS, rather than going through the pain of frequent switching between monitor profiles, it might be better to just have two monitors--one standard gamut, one wide gamut--like I believe Andrew does.
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JeffKohn

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« Reply #24 on: September 10, 2009, 04:17:34 pm »

Quote
If this is indeed the case, there seems currently to be no solution. Images that are in sRGB but are untagged will display incorrectly on wide gamut monitors under the Mac operating system. You can make sure that images on your own web site look OK by always keeping them tagged. But you can't control what others do, and most web images are untagged, so they won't look right in your browser on your monitor.
There is a simple solution. All untagged colors on the web should be treated as if they were tagged sRGB. This is the only thing that makes sense, and I can't fathom why browsers would do anything else. Any untagged content on the web almost certainly started out as sRGB but lost its tag/profile somewhere along the way, or was generated in non-CM-aware application in which case it should also be treated as sRGB since that's essentially what happens when it gets viewed on a tradition display without color management. This would provide better consistency between wide-gamut and normal displays, and would avoid the "oversaturated colors" problem with wide-gamut displays.
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Jeff Kohn
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digitaldog

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« Reply #25 on: September 10, 2009, 04:25:03 pm »

Quote from: JeffKohn
There is a simple solution. All untagged colors on the web should be treated as if they were tagged sRGB. This is the only thing that makes sense, and I can't fathom why browsers would do anything else.

Its not the browser, its the OS.
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AS1

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« Reply #26 on: September 10, 2009, 04:50:51 pm »

Quote from: Arlen
I think the answer to your problem is in the link I gave you in my last reply, if you read it carefully. Here's what I think is going on.

The example image on your computer is in sRGB, and it is TAGGED. Firefox 3.5.2, and Safari, are color managed browsers that recognize the tag--and just like Photoshop, they display it correctly on any monitor.

That same example image in sRGB was stripped of its tag when it was uploaded to the web, so it is now UNTAGGED. The Windows operating system assumes untagged images are in sRGB space, so they display correctly in a color managed browser. But the Mac operating system assumes untagged images are in your monitor's color space, and assigns your monitor's profile--in the case of your calibrated wide-gamut monitor, close to Adobe RGB 1998. The browser displays them as if you had (incorrectly) assigned an aRGB tag.

You can test this by opening your example image in PS, then saving a JPEG version in which you uncheck the box beside "ICC profile: sRGB...", so that the tag is stripped. Now drag that untagged image onto your Firefox or Safari icon; it will probably look the same as the version on your web site:  oversaturated.

If this is indeed the case, there seems currently to be no solution. Images that are in sRGB but are untagged will display incorrectly on wide gamut monitors under the Mac operating system. You can make sure that images on your own web site look OK by always keeping them tagged. But you can't control what others do, and most web images are untagged, so they won't look right in your browser on your monitor.
Yes, thanks Arlen.
Everything you say is true. It also seems for me that my web site is using Flash and this is inherently stripping out the icc profile so even though my images are "tagged" as sRGB (because I've clicked the "icc" box in "save for web" in PS) in the flash website they look oversaturated.

I tried making a html web gallery and comparing it to a flash gallery on my wide gamut display. The goal was to see if "tagging" the images with sRGB would allow them to display properly on a wide gamut display, assuming a colormanaged browser....
I used Adobe Media Gallery to make the web galleries.
One of the garden images has no icc profile, the other has sRGB profile. The odd thing is that on Safari all the images were oversaturated looking (both Flash site and html site) but in Firefox the html site looked good and only the flash site was oversaturated. (You will ONLY see this on a wide gamut display) and on all versions there was no difference between the image that had no profile, and the image with sRGB embedded.....! Open can, dump worms on table!

http://www.alanshortall.com/data/web/AMGht...tent/index.html

http://www.alanshortall.com/data/web/AMGflash/index.html

Anyway, it seems the ultimate solution is to just view web stuff on a different (non wide gamut) display (or buy a PC). But eventually, as more people use the wider gamut displays, it seems like Apple will have to address this issue in a serious way.

Alan.
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WillH

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« Reply #27 on: September 10, 2009, 05:12:05 pm »

Quote from: JeffKohn
There is a simple solution. All untagged colors on the web should be treated as if they were tagged sRGB. This is the only thing that makes sense, and I can't fathom why browsers would do anything else.

A couple of reasons:

1. Browser speed - Color transforms take up a lot of CPU cycles. Browser wars are all about how fast a page can be rendered. A browser that defaults to full color management would score much lower in speed comparison tests.

2. Broken profiles - There are a lot of broken display profiles out there either by profiles that were shipped with the monitor, or by monitors that have incorrect color information programmed into their EDID identifier data. A broken profile with color management can end up making colors look worse than having no color management. Basic sanity checks on the color parameters should be a way around this.
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nik

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« Reply #28 on: September 11, 2009, 01:16:48 am »

Yes, this IS a flash issue. I have your exact hardware setup. I went through all this crap a while ago and traced it down to flash. Although flash v10 supports ICC profiles you have to code your flash content (actionscript 3 code only) to activate Color Management. The blurb is here - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quicksta...correction_as3/

Since you use LiveBooks, you can't do this as everything is done automatically via templates / themes.

If I were you I'd ask LiveBooks for an answer as to when ICC profiles will be understood by their gallery engine.

-Nik

Quote from: AS1
Could this be a Flash issue (I think my website from Livebooks uses Flash)? Could the oversaturated color I'm seeing on web sites be from content created using Flash?

Alan.
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AS1

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« Reply #29 on: September 11, 2009, 08:59:18 pm »

Quote from: WillH
A couple of reasons:

1. Browser speed - Color transforms take up a lot of CPU cycles. Browser wars are all about how fast a page can be rendered. A browser that defaults to full color management would score much lower in speed comparison tests.

2. Broken profiles - There are a lot of broken display profiles out there either by profiles that were shipped with the monitor, or by monitors that have incorrect color information programmed into their EDID identifier data. A broken profile with color management can end up making colors look worse than having no color management. Basic sanity checks on the color parameters should be a way around this.
I think the issue is the Mac OS (see post above). Browsers such as Firefox and Safari are color managed already.

Alan.
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AS1

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« Reply #30 on: September 11, 2009, 09:02:18 pm »

Quote from: nik
Yes, this IS a flash issue. I have your exact hardware setup. I went through all this crap a while ago and traced it down to flash. Although flash v10 supports ICC profiles you have to code your flash content (actionscript 3 code only) to activate Color Management. The blurb is here - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quicksta...correction_as3/

Since you use LiveBooks, you can't do this as everything is done automatically via templates / themes.

If I were you I'd ask LiveBooks for an answer as to when ICC profiles will be understood by their gallery engine.

-Nik

Yes, this is definitely a good point. It's frustrating to take so much care to make sure the images are tagged sRGB, only to have Flash disregard the profile.
Thanks for the input all,

Alan.
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JeffKohn

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« Reply #31 on: September 13, 2009, 11:02:23 pm »

Quote from: WillH
A couple of reasons:

1. Browser speed - Color transforms take up a lot of CPU cycles. Browser wars are all about how fast a page can be rendered. A browser that defaults to full color management would score much lower in speed comparison tests.
I was speaking in the context of browers that are already doing full color management (eg FireFox with color_management set to '1').

Quote
2. Broken profiles - There are a lot of broken display profiles out there either by profiles that were shipped with the monitor, or by monitors that have incorrect color information programmed into their EDID identifier data. A broken profile with color management can end up making colors look worse than having no color management. Basic sanity checks on the color parameters should be a way around this.
Again, this seems like a straw-man argument. These browsers are already doing color management, they're just treating untagged colors in a stupid way. How good or bad somebody's monitor profile might be is completely beside the point.
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Jeff Kohn
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« Reply #32 on: September 13, 2009, 11:03:59 pm »

Quote from: digitaldog
Its not the browser, its the OS.
I'm not Mac guru, but this seems unlikely to me. Are you saying applications have no control over color management in Mac-land, and that it's entirely up to the OS? That's certainly not the case in Windows. How could Photoshop behave correctly on Macs if that were true?
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Jeff Kohn
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Arlen

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« Reply #33 on: September 13, 2009, 11:26:05 pm »

Quote from: JeffKohn
I'm not Mac guru, but this seems unlikely to me. Are you saying applications have no control over color management in Mac-land, and that it's entirely up to the OS? That's certainly not the case in Windows. How could Photoshop behave correctly on Macs if that were true?

For an untagged image, Photoshop accepts the OS default. Under Windows, the default is the sRGB profile. Under the Mac OS, the default is the monitor profile. Only untagged images are affected by this situation. An image has to be tagged to be color-managed by PS (or other similar programs, like a color-managed browser), and then it will be displayed similarly under either OS.
« Last Edit: September 13, 2009, 11:27:52 pm by Arlen »
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JeffKohn

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« Reply #34 on: September 13, 2009, 11:31:18 pm »

Quote from: Arlen
For an untagged image, Photoshop accepts the OS default. Under Windows, the default is the sRGB profile. Under the Mac OS, the default is the monitor profile. Only untagged images are affected by this situation. An image has to be tagged to be color-managed by PS (or other similar programs), and then it will be displayed similarly under either OS.
When I open an untagged image in Photoshop, it asks me how to treat it and I choose the appropriate option. But regardless, it's up to the application what to do. Firefox is not using the OS default, at least not under Windows. If it did treat untagged colors as sRGB I would be happy; but it doesn't.
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Jeff Kohn
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Arlen

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« Reply #35 on: September 14, 2009, 12:06:54 am »

Quote from: JeffKohn
Firefox is not using the OS default, at least not under Windows. If it did treat untagged colors as sRGB I would be happy; but it doesn't.

It does for me, Jeff. I'm using Windows XP, with the LCD2690 wide gamut monitor, and version 3.5.3 of Firefox, with gfx.color_management.mode =1. An image in the sRGB color space looks the same in Firefox whether it is tagged or untagged, and the same as the tagged version does in PS. On the other hand, an image in Adobe RGB displays correctly in Firefox when it is tagged, but not when it is untagged, as expected for a color-managed browser that is using sRGB as its default.

However, I misspoke (mistyped?) when I said that PS accepts the OS default. Instead, it assumes that an image is in the color space that you picked in the Color Settings/Working Spaces menu for your default working space. So when you open an untagged image in PS, and check "Leave as is (don't color manage)", PS will assume it is in ProPhoto RGB, if that is your selected working space; or that it is in sRGB, if that is your working space; etc.
« Last Edit: September 14, 2009, 12:15:29 am by Arlen »
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digitaldog

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« Reply #36 on: September 14, 2009, 09:28:24 am »

Quote from: JeffKohn
I'm not Mac guru, but this seems unlikely to me. Are you saying applications have no control over color management in Mac-land, and that it's entirely up to the OS? That's certainly not the case in Windows. How could Photoshop behave correctly on Macs if that were true?

With untagged documents, something somewhere has to assume the color space of the data in color managed applications. In Photoshop you set your working space as that color space to use for the assumption of the current untagged numbers. In this OS, it assumes your display profile.
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