Aug 13, 2007
Colour-shift conundrum
I’ve noticed that the photos which I import from my camera into Adobe Lightroom, tweak and then export, look completely different when I look at them on Flickr.
I realised, in fact, that the slightly washed-out look is something to do with Firefox, rather than Flickr, because the same images in Safari retain the colours from the Lightroom versions.
Here’s an example of an image from that Girly One-Track photoshoot a while back, which I’ve loaded in both browsers, Firefox on the left and Safari on the right - the line down the middle is the OSX window shadow, because the Safari window was in front of the other.
But look at the difference in colour! It seems to mainly affect the red and blue channels. Her skin is paler, the coat’s a different shade of blue.
This is pretty irritating, frankly, because now I’m trying to figure out whether I need to calibrate my version of lightroom in order to be able to see how images are going to look once they’ve been through the Firefox wash, and edit accordingly, or whether I should just try and ensure people only look at my pics in safari, or risk seeing a sort of tired version, which isn’t quite what I expected or intended.
This reminds me of a disclaimer I had on this site back in 2000 or so, when it was customary to have a little chunk on every page saying “Best viewed in IE” or “best viewed at 1024×768″. Mine, meanwhile, said “for best viewing experience, come over to my place and look at this site on my monitor.”
This is a useful article on what’s going on beneath the bonnet between macs & pcs in the way that they digest & display colours: this is your mac on drugs. Plus this is pretty helpful: Mac Browsers: can you believe your eyes?. Answer: no, basically.
Anyone else have this experience? And anyone know what to do about it? Suggestions welcome!
FF doesn’t obey ColorSync/ICC profiles. Safari does.
The link you posted blames Apple for supporting full colour management, which seems a bit arse about face to me. More like: “Non-Mac Browsers (or rather: Non-Safari): can you believe your eyes?”
The best explanation for using the default monitor Colour Profile is that “Safari does colour management only for images with a color profile actually embedded. They didn’t want to do management for unprofiled images because they don’t do management for CSS and flash colors, and during a beta when they did do management for non-profiled images, web designers complained loudly that their CSS/flash colours didn’t match their image colors (such as images used to create the look and feel of a page, like buttons, mastheads, etc).”
(Source: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16769#c115 which is the “Support ICC in FF” feature request”
Anyway, don’t know about Lightroom, but Photoshop most definitely does let you view and embed specific colour profiles, so one could tell it to use sRGB for all-round consistency.
Incidentally, Safari/Win supports ICC…
Ugh what a pain! Although I’m not familiar with this particular problem (being a PC user), I am very familiar with the issues in trying to get web content to look the same in all browsers and all monitors. These days I’ve given up caring. The hassle involved in getting my site to look good for other people really isn’t worth it. If they think my site looks crap because they have a low res monitor, that is their problem, not mine.
Yeah, I have exactly the same issue. It’s a browser issue, really. Firefox gets it wrong. Like, a million miles wrong. I’ve played around with all sorts of different tricks for embedding profiles (including the profile of the monitor I’m looking at) and in the end, I just gave up.
It annoys me, because I know the FF users don’t see the “real” colour. At the same time… I had to be pragmatic. For now, what I show on Flickr is a particular take on my pictures, but it’s certainly not the ideal way to display them. I’m not keen on optimising-for-Flickr anyhow (ie: most people don’t look at “all sizes”, so should I sharpen for about 480 wide?).
I’m waiting to see if anything will get fixed - hopefully at the Lightroom end of things. And at some point I’m probably going to buy a Pantone Huey, because I’m convinced my monitor’s not calibrated right anyway. Hope something gets fixed soon, though.
But yeah, it’s a bummer, and sorry I can’t suggest more.
martinb - doesn’t make much difference. I can embed sRGB on export, and yet Firefox still cocks it up.
Perhaps you should put a disclaimer that says "to view these things in true colour, go there/meet them and step away from your computer".
Firefox 3 will have colour profile support, which will mean it’s doing the right thing. To do the wrong thing, strip the colour profile at upload time, which would make both Safari and Firefox look washed out. But consistent.
The other commenters are exactly right. I wrote about colour matching in Gecko on OS X (the Firefox rendering engine) on my blog a while ago. The annoying thing is that it doesn’t seem to work in Safari on Windows either, the colours seem more washed out there too, but maybe that’s just me. The good news is that the long-standing Firefox bug / feature request to add ICC profile support has seen a lot of attention in the last few months, so hopefully this will be much better in future.
So oddly I must be mistaken about Safari on Windows, since someone above says it does support colour profiles. I just don’t notice the striking rendering difference between the browsers on Windows when I’m looking at my photos on Flickr, that I do on OS X. Maybe it’s the screen, too.
I’m not sure why it doesn’t work for some but when I had the same trouble with Aperture (which took the Apple RGB profile from my camera and exported it as is) I solved it by exporting all my pics from there into the sRGB colour space and likewise from Photoshop. I now get Firefox results which look like my original even though it doesn’t work with the ICC profile, it defaults to something very close to sRGB it would seem.
This has been confusing me for a while now - since I started using Lightroom and giving a damn about such things. But whenever I try to understand what’s going on my head starts hurting and my brain shuts down.
Anyway, here’s another link for the pile:
http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2007/08/lightroom_color_spaces_1.html
I normally use Photobox.co.uk for printing. But needing some in a hurry I popped out to Boots today and used their “instant” print machine with some images processed on a PC in Lightroom. The colours are all shot on those too - I guess their (Kodak-made?) console doesn’t support colour profiles either - which is a shame…
[Just reprocessing them lighter before popping back to Boots...]
I just figured out a fail-safe solution.
From now on I shall only publish black an white photos.