Colour – Safari vs Firefox (mac)

[wulf]

Originally Posted by Bigcrustyape

Yeah, I hear what you are saying Wulf, but I am talking about viewing the same image on the same monitor at the same time in the same light, just having both browsers open and seeing vastly different results.

That probably just makes the problem much more apparent - like putting a polar bear in a snowstorm and realising that the bear really has quite yellow-ish fur (*).

Taking a look at your recent pictures from the Burma protest (using Firefox on Linux) I'm sure I'm not getting the colours the way you see them on your monitor but neither am I seeing colours so out of wack that I can't bear to look at them. In fact, they look pretty good.

If you want complete control, you have to limit your audience (for example, printing them and having them hung in a gallery where only a relatively small number of people can see them); with images where you feel the colours are particularly sensitive, a more pragmatic approach might be to fine tune it for your calibrated system and then also publish a version that has been hacked to approximate the appearance in a "colour-profile blind" browser like Firefox.

Wulf

(*) or, probably more easily, putting any two things that you would describe as having the same colour next to each other - this often shows a marked difference.

[Isilwen]

Hey BCA - I took these for you this morning after downloading Safari (which I quite like, thanks!) They look identical to me, so rest assured we're not all seeing some horrible aberration of your shots

Firefox 2.0 vs. Safari (all on a Windows PC platform)

[RejectReality]

Originally Posted by Bigcrustyape

Firefox users see washed out, badly white balanced images whereas the Safari users see my imagery as I had intended it to be.

Is there anything I can do to fix this?? Has anybody else noticed this? Makes me wonder what my pics look like on a PC too for IE users.

HELP!

I've experienced this phenomenon too.

It's a combination of ColourSync and colour profiles, either correctly or incorrectly applied.

Non-colour-managed applications will exhibit this behaviour if you are using a colour profile for anything other then sRGB (which includes firefox and pretty much anything on Windows).

Here's an example from my own collection:


The Safari one on the right is the colour accurate one (and yes, it was a really eerie, foggy night - you couldn't see more than about 20 metres in front of you with the exception of the sodium streetlights burning through the fog).

In my case, my Mac assumes Canon RAW files (produced by a 400D) are shot in Adobe 1998 colour space, even though ColourSync has been told the camera images are sRGB (and the concept of colour space doesn't really exist with RAW, but I digress).

This ColourSync assumption propagates through to the final image, unless a colourspace conversion is performed (either a real conversion, or replacing the ColourSync profile with the correct one - I'm still trying to determine which produces the best and least damaging result).

I'm still nutting out the details of how to do this in a less sucky way. My currently method uses an Automator workflow to prepare the images for upload (copy, rename, resize, fix ColourSync profile), although I'd much rather fix the root cause of the problem.

[brianmullnl]

...and then the next question is why do I look at some incredibly vivid pictures on Flickr that look the same in Safari and Firefox? What is being done differently for them. Do they have post-processing software or a certain setting or file format in common?

[wulf]

Because those have been worked on without any special colour profile. That might cause problems when printing but, at least at present, is probably the most pragmatic way to go for pictures that will be distributed online.

Wulf

[RejectReality]

Originally Posted by wulf

Because those have been worked on without any special colour profile. That might cause problems when printing but, at least at present, is probably the most pragmatic way to go for pictures that will be distributed online.

From what I can find out, there's a little more to it than that.

There is an underlying assumption in applications that images on the 'net are in sRGB colourspace, unless both of these are true:
1) you tell it different by embedding your preferred colour profile, and
2) your application actually cares about colour profiles.

If you have an application that doesn't care, it will try to render the images in sRGB, irrespective of your embedded profile. Most applications on Windows and third party apps on OSX fall in this basket (apps that use ColourSync on OSX and other colour aware applications like Photoshop do not).

This can be proved by stripping the colour profile out of the image file. If it was originally in sRGB, you should not notice a difference in rendering. If your image was in another profile, you will notice an difference in colour managed applications (as now they will fall back to the default sRGB profile), but not in non-colour managed applications (as they didn't care about your profile in the first place).

So, if your image is hitting the net, work in sRGB, either explicitly or implicitly. It's the easiest way to reduce pain.