Profile Question

Hello,

I'm struggling to decide on which colour space to use when saving for the web. I know the standard is sRGB; however, as you all know, you lose significant colour spectrum when converting from Adobe RGB or PhotoPro RGB. I'm finding this is particularly the case with reds, yellows, and oranges, all often present during prime light, and I'd like to show photos in as close to the original colours as possible.

Yesterday I learned that some browsers are colour-managed and support monitor profiles. I tried it out by re-opening some of my original photos in Photoshop, assigning my monitor's profile rather than sRGB, and resizing/saving them back to JPEG. I then posted them on Flickr and Picasa (to diversify the host applications), and noticed the difference, it's quite stark. It turns out Firefox (4.x), Safari, and Explorer (9) support colour management/profiles, while Google Chrome does not; so not much difference with this latter browser.

Now I'm confused; should I save in sRGB mode and have photos look the same on all browsers, but at the expense of loss of colour, or should I go for quality, but then I'll have to inform (depend on) people looking at my photos to use the proper browsers? What is the norm, if there is one, or is there another way around all this; maybe I'm missing something and doing it all wrong, being a rookie in digital photography.

I'm attaching a photo to illustrate, just open it in Google Chrome in one part of your screen, and Safari or Firefox 4 on the other, side-by-side, and compare. I tried it out on the two different desktops/monitors I have at home, and I noticed the difference quite easily.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Joe, I think your safest bet is to imbed sRGB into your jpeg images. Yes, you'll lose some color, but you should have consistency across browsers. Don't imbed a monitor profile. It will look great on your screen, assuming your system is using that profile, but it likely will not show your images as you would like on another system.

Just a note: After flattening, converting to 8-bit, and prior to saving an image for the Web, I convert the image's profile to sRGB. That way I know the correct profile is already embedded.

--P

Thanks Preston.

I was using sRGB until now; for most images I can live with some loss of color; but the reds of sunrise and sunset are taking a hit. I tried re-processing the images to add more color after the conversion to sRGB, but I couldn't get it close enough to the original for my taste, due to sRGB (and perhaps also my processing skills) being relatively limited.

As I said in my original post, I viewed the images saved with a monitor profile on two screens, one being a cheap 6-year old non-wide gamut LCD; both kept the original colors when viewed with the right browser(s). If you looked at the photo above in Chrome and Firefox, did you notice any difference?

Thanks again for your advice; I think I might combine both approaches, depending on the photo.

Joe,
I think Preston's advice is spot on and reflects current best practices for web images.

My question to you is: who is your audience for these images? Most viewers have mediocre TN-based monitors, which of course are not calibrated. Combine that with non-color managed browsers and the odds of your image being viewed to what you feel is its fullest fidelity is pretty slim.

Reading about your using monitor profiles embedded in images (which is not a best practice), I would also suggest you learn more about color management. For web delivery all I can do is work the image best I can in ProPhoto in Lightroom and then export as sRGB.

ME

Thanks Michael. I only embedded the profile for a few photos yesterday; this is not something I'm doing regularly. I have so far followed the practice of converting to sRGB for the Web, and will continue to do so for the most part. I am familiar with color management (at least the basics that I need), but was just looking for a way of showing a few select photos at their best. As I said in my original post, the experiment I tried (now with 4-5 photos) was conducted on a non-IPS, non-calibrated cheap monitor. If I continue with this practice (again for just a few photos), I will inform my audience of the need to view them in the right browser; granted they might not necessarily follow the advice. My audience is for the most part family and friends; I work in the IT industry, and many of my friends are fellow amateur photographers.

Your and Preston's advice is valuable to me; I'll keep it in mind, and this will keep me in check so I won't go overboard with my non-standard approach; again, if I do this, it will be for just a few shots.

Cheers.

Most folks are not going to be interested in changing browsers just to view your images...may be sad, but true. Use the advice given for the best "you" can do. Viewers with knowledge about photography and images as seen through monitors on the web realize that what we see may not be exactly what anyone else sees and that it may be quite different from what an actual print will look like. The general public has no clue about these things.

In my website, I do let them know that what they see on their monitor may be different than what I see on mine. I then tell them the prints look wonderful. That is about all I tell them...can't waste the screen space tutoring them about sRGB, RGB, calibrated monitors, color spaces, etc.

BTW, your image above looks wonderful to me on my Mac monitor...nice one!

"Most folks are not going to be interested in changing browsers just to view your images".

True, but again, I have a limited audience, and they're quite knowledgeable in IT; most already use Firefox (among other browsers that support color management); But sure, I have to keep in mind future audiences and adopt a standard approach...

Conclusion: IF I pursue this approach, it will be quite limited.

Thanks for your feedback and thanks for the compliment about the photo

Joe - A couple of things :

-- MS Internet Explorer is not properly color managed. There have been some claims that it is, but it's really just profile aware, and doesn't actually handle the color output properly. It doesn't actually let the colors in the image get converted properly through your monitor profile. Instead it seems to assume that the output color space is sRGB. So if your monitor is close to that things will look pretty good; But otherwise things are still wrong.

-- Only Firefox 3.x actually handles both v2 and v4 ICC profiles correctly. Because of some issues with the v4 profiles in their color management systems (Firefox switched from LCMS to QCMS - for speed, I think), Safari and newer Firefox's only support v2 profiles.

-- In my experience (computer engineer here) even a lot of tech savvy people don't calibrate their monitors and don't want to (and won't even when they see what a difference it can make).

-- Don't assign your monitor profile to images, as Preston said. That's not a generic standard and could look really wonky on other people's systems.

Thanks for the precisions David. My remark about IT-knowledgeable people was in response to them having to switch browsers or not, not about having to calibrate their monitors. I get your points though.