Suspicious Colour Management using Google Chrome Browser

[lightshiner]

My computer setup for photography is based on a low cost laptop supplemented by an external monitor (actually a Samsung LED TV) which I calibrate using a Spyder4EXPRESS from Datacolor. Last night I encountered a problem which was driving me to distraction.

After somewhat carefully using Lightroom to develop some pictures and I noticed a colour shift in images uploaded to Google products such Google+ and Google Drive. This was unexpected since I exported the images from Lightroom using sRGB (converted from Adobe98). The problems only seem to occur when I displayed the image in the Chrome browser (local display seemed to match the Lightroom preview).

After some searching on the web, it seems that Chrome "remembers" the colour management of the monitor from which the application was launched. Therefore moving a Chrome window from one monitor after launching to another can lead to unexpected results. This was my case exactly as I launched Chrome from the laptop and then moved its window to the calibrated LED monitor.

Launching Chrome directly from the calibrated monitor seems to have forced Chrome to use its colour profile and therefore Chrome displays an image that is closer to that displayed by Lightroom.

Be forewarned!

Regards,

David

P.S. I'm on Windows 8.1 and running Chrome Version 43.0.2357.81 m

[D Fosse]

I don't use Chrome, but even Firefox lacks multi-monitor support. It uses the display profile set up as system default for your main monitor, wherever the app window happens to be.

It's not like Photoshop or Lightroom, which uses display profiles independently per screen.

It's just the way it is, no big deal as long as you're aware of it.

[lightshiner]

I don't use Chrome, but even Firefox lacks multi-monitor support. It uses the display profile set up as system default for your main monitor, wherever the app window happens to be.

It's not like Photoshop or Lightroom, which uses display profiles independently per screen.

It's just the way it is, no big deal as long as you're aware of it.

Thanks for the explanation. Chrome probably only uses a single profile as well (when encountering multiple monitors). Interestingly, Internet Explorer, seems to use a different mapping (closer to Lightroom's second monitor).

- David

[D Fosse]

IE is a special case. It doesn't use the monitor profile at all, but substitutes sRGB. Pretty meaningless to have all the color management logic in place, and then botch it by deliberately using the wrong profile. The astonishing thing is that someone obviously thought this was a great idea... 

What they did, effectively, was to make sure nothing displays correctly, ever, under any circumstances...that's an achievement in itself...

Windows Photo Viewer does it right, so it's not as if they don't know how.

[lightshiner]

IE is a special case. It doesn't use the monitor profile at all, but substitutes sRGB. Pretty meaningless to have all the color management logic in place, and then botch it by deliberately using the wrong profile. The astonishing thing is that someone obviously thought this was a great idea...  

What they did, effectively, was to make sure nothing displays correctly, ever, under any circumstances...that's an achievement in itself...

Windows Photo Viewer does it right, so it's not as if they don't know how.

Thanks. I seldom use Internet Explorer but was curious as to how it compared to Chrome.

I've done a bit more experimenting with Chrome and Google+. It seems to me that the colour shift is related to the size of the displayed image. Slightly enlarged image is more saturated (see comparison in attached screenshot, larger image is on the right).


- David