Colour rendition issues - different browsers

[ptarmigan]

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Hi

 

I'm putting together a new site UKstreetPhotography and I've noticed that on the site colour images appear markedly different when viewed in safari (which is fine) and firefox (which is not). Strangely, all the images throughout the site - on the homepage and in the galleries etc - change colour significantly, more saturated with a red bias when viewed in firefox. The files have an embedded sRGB profile which I have checked.

 

however when I view images on this site I see no significant difference whatever browser I use.

 

Any suggestions?

[sandymc]

Well, there a a number of possible issues, but first thing to do is to check that the images are in the sRGB color space.

 

Sandy

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[ptarmigan]

Well, there a a number of possible issues, but first thing to do is to check that the images are in the sRGB color space.

 

Sandy

 

I already sated that in my original post and though I use Lightroom 3 for all my work, I did check the images in Bridge and CS5 too and the embedded profile is sRGB.

[stunsworth]

Don't you want to convert to sRGB rather than embed the profile?

 

I don't know if it's still the case, but Firefox didn't used to recognise embedded profiles by default - it had to be switched on by the user. Have you switched on colour management?

 

I found this which may be useful...

 

WEB BROWSER COLOR MANAGEMENT Tutorial - Test Page FireFox Safari Chrome Internet Explorer IE 9- FILES have embedded ICC profiles Photoshop ColorManagement

[ptarmigan]

Steve

 

You sound like you understand this a little more than do I

 

I exported the images using LR3's export and selected the sRGB check box. I had assumed that would have been fine and I'll be less than chuffed if I then need to something extra with PS to actually convert as well. What do you think? I will check out your link though.

 

I tried using the LR3 flash website generator but that didn't work for me due to colour management issues between LR3 and/or Flash.

[andybarton]

The colour ones look very saturated with this Internet Explorer 7 browser, running on Windows XP. But, IE doesn't have any colour management built in at all.

[ptarmigan]

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The colour ones look very saturated with this Internet Explorer 7 browser, running on Windows XP.

 

Thanks Andy. I've just run the homepage images through PS CS5 and converted to sRGB profile. Initially it seemed that LR3 only embedded the profile. I'll see if this works. All the images on the site are test images as present but it's going to be a bugg@ if I have to run a batch process is PS before I can upload. It may make me rethink using LR3 if there's no other way.

[stunsworth]

You sound like you understand this a little more than do I

 

Not really, I normally push everything from Lightroom to Photoshop when I'm creating web images rather than Lightroom on its own, but it was your use of the word 'embed' that attracted my attention.

 

I have the Martin Evening Lightroom book on my iPad, I'll have a look tonight to see what he was to say about saving web images.

[andybarton]

You can batch process in PS very easily if you set up an action to do what you want.

[ptarmigan]

You can batch process in PS very easily if you set up an action to do what you want.

 

Yes but I had hoped LR3 would do this sort of thing. Then if I 'convert' using PS I will then have to update the images in LR and at the moment that seems to be a manual update of each image. If hat's the case, I'll be looking to drop LR from my workflow. Maybe there's some batch update I can run in LR3. Still, either way its pretty shoddy of Adobe.

[ptarmigan]

OK, uploaded into PS CS5, converted to sRGB, saved then update files in LR. Finally uploaded files onto site. No change at all!

 

Still way to saturated in Firefox, safari is fine. Having looked at Steve's 'link' on colour management, I do see a change with the untagged sRGB image that seems similar to what I seeing here so I'll need to investigate further.

 

Thanks again everyone and I'll keep you posted.

[roguewave]

Ian, I might be just restating the obvious, but here's my workflow & why. If you use Bridge/Lightroom, than you are obviously interested in the Content Management features. That's essential to me. Depending on the camera & use of the images I use Lightroom or Hasselblad Phocus. Phocus is the better of the two for many M8 images. I don't use it as the standard raw processor, but it is the cleanup batter for me.

 

In LR, I always export to a full TIFF file with an embedded profile of ProPhoto & use PS. It has the largest gamut & I want as much info as I can get. I process the images with an alternative name, leaving the full tiff file intact. When I make a file for the web, I usually resize a tiff file to 100K and then use the "Save to Web" option in PS. I can reszise the sRGB file to the appropriate size used on that site. I haven't seen much of a difference on the various browsers. Firefox has it's special idiosyncrasies. If that's the only browser that's rendering differently, I'd check your settings in Firefox. It's a great "developer's" browser, but because of it's malleability, other software that's been added can change settings and have unintended results.

[ptarmigan]

The plot thickens! My very expensive calibrated Eizo monitor running off an equally expensive Mac Pro produces markedly different colours - Safari looks fine and matches PS CS5, Bridge and LR3. Firefox looks awful, way too saturated.

 

My uncalibrated macbook pro produces near identical colours in either browser. I checked Andy Barton's site in Safari on the Mac Pro with Safari - images look natural and great but in Firefox many are way over-satuated. A quick check on the macbook pro and again both browsers are fine.

 

It must be something to do with how either the Mac Pro or the calibration/Eizo combo works. I'm going to shift monitor profiles on the Mac Pro to see that has an effect, I'll report back.

[ho_co]

Ian, I'm possibly way off base on this, and definitely way off the track you're currently pursuing.

 

When you converted your images to sRGB in Photoshop before exporting them to the Web as JPGs, did you also uncheck the checkbox "Embed color profile" in the "Save as..." dialog box?

 

My fuzzy brain thinks that at one time some browsers could get confused by embedded profiles: An sRGB file with embedded profile would be differently interpreted by some browsers than the same file without embedded profile.

 

Please, anyone, correct me if I'm drifting in uncharted color space on this one.

[ptarmigan]

OK, hopefully an understandable explanation of what is going on as explained to me by Colour Confidence Support

 

With wide gamut monitors, when you view web apps using Firefox or IE, there are issues where images appear over saturated which is down to the way the monitor itself renders the 'untagged' (as far as the browser is concerned) image when viewed in those browsers. In effect there is no colour management going on in the browser and the monitor 'sees' this and because of the wider gamut of the monitor, it displays over saturated . On my Eizo, I can switch to sRGB from Custom (my normal viewing profile) and when I do so, Firefox displays exactly the same colours as Safari.

 

My Macbook Pro and old shitty pc lappy don't have the issue as they don't display any colours outside sRGB. Hope this explains things. So gents, we need to flog out expensive wide gamut monitors and go back to cheap ones. Problem solved.

[Nicoleica]

I'm ahead of the game then, After my expensive LaCie monitor decided to turn into a blue lamp and was beyond economic repair, I purchased a very inexpensive iiyama ProLite E2472HD monitor. I'm very happy with it, and it was under a quarter of the cost of a new LaCie too.

[adan]

1. I don't believe you can tag an image with an incorrect color space. You can tag it or not tag it - but the tag is automatically generated by the actual color space. So you can't tag an Adobe 1998 image as sRGB without actually converting it to sRGB (or vice versa).

 

2. As mentioned, some browsers are not color-managed. They assume all images are sRGB (tagged or untagged, sRGB or not).

 

3. It is a basic issue of mass photographic communication via the Web that one has no control over one's audience - or their computers. And the vast majority of monitors out there are not profiled.

 

In setting up my own sites, I change my monitor settings from calibrated and profiled (as I use it for printing and general image processing) to more generic, dumb settings that more accurately reflect the "generic" user's factory settings: Maximum brightness, default factory "profile" and sRGB color space (untagged) for all my images.

[wattsy]

1. I don't believe you can tag an image with an incorrect color space. You can tag it or not tag it - but the tag is automatically generated by the actual color space. So you can't tag an Adobe 1998 image as sRGB without actually converting it to sRGB (or vice versa).

 

I think you can. If you discard the profile from an Adobe RGB image when you get the profile mismatch dialog in PS, it is possible to then assign (Edit menu "Assign profile...") a completely different profile such as sRGB without having made any kind of conversion. Try it and you'll see it makes a bit of a mess of things.

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[sandymc]

2. As mentioned, some browsers are not color-managed. They assume all images are sRGB (tagged or untagged, sRGB or not).

 

Unfortunately not. What they often assume is that the image is in the color space of the display; that's different to assuming sRGB.

 

Sandy

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[adan]

Ian - so after you do what you say, what is the color space of the image once you save it?

 

sRGB!

 

I.E. you have "converted" it (into the working color space) whether you intended to or not, or whether you went through a specific step to convert it or not. Once it is opened in the sRGB color space it is an sRGB image. (The exception being to use the first option - "use embedded profile")

 

Happens to me all the time (although I know it is happening) - I open an old file I saved years ago in Apple RGB, get the dialogue box you show, discard the profile as you show, save the image - and from then on it opens as an Adobe 1998 image (my current working space).

 

Certainly it is not necessarily converted properly (that would be using the middle option) - but if it was in one color space, and is now in another, that's a "conversion" by any sensible meaning of the word.

 

A key point - no image can exist without being in SOME color space. It may not have an embedded tag or profile saying WHICH color space. But there has to be some defined space for the RGB values to have any meaning.

 

In other words, if I give you a pixel with values 200R/50G/10B - do you (or your computer) have any idea what that color is - without reference to some color space for coordinates?

 

The analogy being that if I say I am at "37 north, 5 west" - you still do not know where I am, unless you ASSUME I am using global latitude and longitude. And you still might be wrong - if I'm at 5th Avenue and 37th Street (in the "Manhattan" reference space).

 

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sandy - possibly. I'll take that under advisement. Are we confusing "color space" with "profile"?

 

To borrow Ian's technique, here is what I get when I open a screenshot from my Mac. I don't consider my monitor profile to be a "color space" - in that it is not a universally defined color space like sRGB or Adobe 1998 or Prophoto that is used across many computers all over the world.

 

So are you saying that the "color space" for my monitor is "Monaco 11_2010"?

 

I'll admit that my color management boot camp years took place when the vast majority of monitors probably were sRGB, and that trainers such as Bruce Fraser may well have used "sRGB" as short-hand for "color space of the display" - because in 95% of cases they were identical. Or browsers may have changed their approach over the years.

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