A Smugmug world with color-managed browsers

jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
edited February 19, 2008 in SmugMug Support
As I've finally begun to understand how color management really works on a Windows computer and I'm seeing some current trends with Safari and Firefox on Windows, I'm thinking that Smugmug may need to start planning ahead a bit for more thorough color management.

Today, we have a situation where all uploaded images are converted to sRGB (if they have a color profile tag other than sRGB) and only the original is left with a color profile as part of the image. All the generated sizes are stripped and are untagged.

When nearly all browsers are dumb and wouldn't know what to do with the color profile tag anyway, that makes some sense. Might as well save some storage space and download time and a little bandwidth.

But, the future is just around the corner. Safari for the Mac already reads color profiles. The latest Safari for Windows beta now reads color profiles. The next version of Firefox (3.0 in developer beta now) already has color management in it. With all this competitive pressure, it seems safe to assume that even IE will add it.

So, you ask, if all Smumug images are sRGB, then why does it matter whether the image has a profile in it or not and why does it matter if the browser is color managed or not?

That's what I used to think until I understood what happens a little better. To understand this, let's look at what happens in Safari when it displays a properly tagged image. First, it reads the profile of the image. Then, it maps those colors in the image profile to the profile of the monitor. This transformation does two things. First, it accounts for the source profile colorspace of the image. So, if it's ProPhotoRGB or AdobeRGB (wider gamut images), the color numbers in the image are interpreted properly for that color space. Second, it reads the monitor profile and understands it's display bias so that the properly interpreted source RGB numbers can be transformed into something that will display properly on the particular monitor with it's profile.

Now, what happens when this same Safari browser encounters an untagged image. It basically decides that it really knows nothing about the color space of this image so rather than doing any converting of it, it just sends the RAW RGB values from the image right to the screen. If the image is indeed sRGB (even though it isn't tagged as sRGB which is the case in Smugmug's generated image sizes), then the image won't be way off because most displays are relatively close to sRGB. But, Safari will also skip converting the image to the monitor profile, so unless your monitor is perfect sRGB, you will not get an ideal display of that image. The image in Safari will not look like it's original did in Photoshop or Safari. This will be a bummer. Depending upon how far your monitor is from sRGB, you will see shifts in the image colors. If the image was properly tagged as sRGB, then Safari would understand it as sRGB and properly take into account your monitor profile and then Smugmug down-sized version would display exactly the same as the original.

But, you ask, how does display calibration fit into this? If you calibrate your display to sRGB, won't that fix all this and the image will display perfectly? The answer is no. As I discovered recently, calibrating your display is more about creating a monitor profile that accurately describes what colors your monitor produces than it is about actually adjusting the colors of your monitor to some standard. So, a fully calibrated monitor will not necessarily be a perfect sRGB monitor. But, if color-managed software that reads it's monitor profile is used, that software can take any image in a known standard color profile and (within the limits of the gamut of the display), use that monitor profile to understand the display bias of the monitor and adjust what it sends to the monitor to get near perfect rendering of something like an sRGB source image. If the monitor profile is not used, then the image is not adjusted to take into account the biases of the display and you do not get proper colors. On a quality display, these biases won't be huge, but they will still be noticable.

So ... the consquences of display an untagged sRGB image in a color-aware browser like Safari or Firefox 3 is that the monitor profile is not used and the display of the image is NOT adjusted for the biases of the monitor. The image colors are degraded, even when the source image was sRGB. Add the tag in for sRGB and Safari now uses the monitor profile.

You might ask, why does Safari not use the monitor profile when the image is not tagged. I don't know why they did it this way, but it is the way it is and it's been that way on the Mac for a long time so it's unlikely to change so we just have to deal with it that way. I can understand some logic that says if we don't know what colorspace it's in, then we really shouldn't muss with the colors at all and that's what it is doing. The unfortunate side affect of this is that the image appears to be treated as if it's tagged with the monitor profile, not sRGB. I say this only because an image that actually was tagged with the monitor profile would need no adjustment to be sent to the monitor which is what Safari does when there'sno profile. If those two (sRGB and the monitor profile) are not exactly the same which they almost never are, the image renders wrong.

You might wonder about monitor profiles. Do you only have a monitor profile is you have profiled your monitor with a hardware profiler like Eye-One Display? No, nearly all display manufacturers offer a "stock" monitor profile that describes their typical monitor performance. If you buy a whole system from someone like HP or Dell, your system should come already installed with that OEM monitor profile. It's probably not that far off, particularly when the display is new and your lighting conditions are not unusual. If you buy a separate monitor, it will either come with a CD or you can go to the manufacturer's web-site to get their monitor profile and install it into Windows as the monitor profile. So, many systems these days do have workable monitor profiles, even when they have been custom profiled/calibrated. So, what I'm talking about here affects even non-calibrated displays.

Is this as clear as mud now?

So ... this is a very long winded technical explanation because I'm recommending that Smugmug look ahead to the days when many browsers in use are color managed and asking them to start including sRGB color profiles on the generated image sizes, particularly the larger sizes. I know the arguments about keeping it off thumbs in order to save download speed, but it seems like it needs to be on the main images. Heck, this is a site for displaying photos and Smugmug should be displaying the larger versions of the photos with as much color accuracy as possible. When a viewer has a color-managed browser, that accuracy requires that the image have a color profile attached.

Smugmug could wait until most browsers are color-managed before adding this, but that would be lagging the marketplace rather than leading it and by then, tens of millions more images would have been uploaded and generated at Smugmug without color profiles attached. I think they should lead in this regard and get it right early on.

Thoughts?
--John
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Comments

  • onethumbonethumb Administrators Posts: 1,269 Major grins
    edited November 26, 2007
    I'm afraid I just did something I *never* do: I skipped reading a jfriend post entirely.

    Why? Because I'll bet that huge post was asking us to add sRGB ICC profiles on our images.

    If I'm right, we've been looking very closely at this for quite some time. The only logical conclusion, given the mess the browser and OS manufacturers have left us with, is to embed the profiles and say "screw bandwidth and speed, they keep getting faster and cheaper anyway". We're a very logical company, so I'll let you draw your own logical conclusions. ;)

    If I'm wrong, I apologize. Tell me so and I'll go back and read the post. :)
  • BaldyBaldy Registered Users, Super Moderators Posts: 2,853 moderator
    edited November 26, 2007
    Good post, John. We've been talking about this internally with Safari's move to Windows and FF3.

    A year ago I had some correspondence with the Safari team that led me to believe they were going to assume sRGB if the image is untagged, which is so utterly logical. I have to believe 99.99% of all images on the web are sRGB and you're never gonna see CNN and eBay attaching profiles to their images.

    There's even an easier fix: ship the Mac with a 2.2 gamma. As configured by the factory, Macs don't render photos without ICC profiles accurately, nor do they render Flash, CSS, or HTML in the colors the artists intended. Apple tells you in their help sections to set your gamma at 2.2 so that the Internets won't be busted.

    I feel like Bill Atkinson and I could drive to Apple, meet with Steve for 30 minutes, make our case for why 1.8 gamma is a mistake, and he'd make the Mac and Safari compatible with the Internet (and compatible with iPhone and Apple TV).

    Bill worked for Apple when they chose 1.8 gamma to make things look right on some grayscale printer everyone has forgotten now. And I worked at NeXT when we chose 1.8 because Apple did.

    I was at a party last night showing photos on my iPhone over AT&Ts slow network (I noticed you spoke broadly about Safari--do we know how iPhone Safari does color management?), and I was thinking, "Great. We're gonna add ICC profiles to make this even slower. And we're doing this why? Because some Apple products have an archaic gamma?"

    John, what about Andrew Rodney's contention that this is the year for Adobe RGB so converting to sRGB is the wrong thing to do in the first place?
  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 26, 2007
    Baldy wrote:
    Good post, John. We've been talking about this internally with Safari's move to Windows and FF3.

    A year ago I had some correspondence with the Safari team that led me to believe they were going to assume sRGB if the image is untagged, which is so utterly logical. I have to believe 99.99% of all images on the web are sRGB and you're never gonna see CNN and eBay attaching profiles to their images.

    There's even an easier fix: ship the Mac with a 2.2 gamma. As configured by the factory, Macs don't render photos without ICC profiles accurately, nor do they render Flash, CSS, or HTML in the colors the artists intended. Apple tells you in their help sections to set your gamma at 2.2 so that the Internets won't be busted.

    I feel like Bill Atkinson and I could drive to Apple, meet with Steve for 30 minutes, make our case for why 1.8 gamma is a mistake, and he'd make the Mac and Safari compatible with the Internet (and compatible with iPhone and Apple TV).

    Bill worked for Apple when they chose 1.8 gamma to make things look right on some grayscale printer everyone has forgotten now. And I worked at NeXT when we chose 1.8 because Apple did.

    I was at a party last night showing photos on my iPhone over AT&Ts slow network (I noticed you spoke broadly about Safari--do we know how iPhone Safari does color management?), and I was thinking, "Great. We're gonna add ICC profiles to make this even slower. And we're doing this why? Because some Apple products have an archaic gamma?"

    John, what about Andrew Rodney's contention that this is the year for Adobe RGB so converting to sRGB is the wrong thing to do in the first place?

    My post didn't really have anything to do with Apple's 1.8 gamma. I followed that issue when you guys raised it awhile ago and it does seem like Apple is just wrong there. But, what I was writing about had everything to do with all the Windows computers that will get better color display when images have profiles and the viewer has a color managed browser. Even on my brand new 30" HP monitor that is fully profiled with Eye-One Display2 on my new Windows Vista computer, a Smugmug JPEG in Safari has it's color shifted versus Photoshop looking at the full original with ICC profile. That's because my monitor isn't perfect sRGB. Photoshop uses the monitor profile to make minor corrections before display. Safari does not use the monitor profile because it doesn't see any ICC profile in the Smugmug JPEG. So, even without the gamma problem, there's still a color shift that occurs because of the missing ICC sRGB profile.

    I don't know what Safari on iPhone does for color management. It is supposedly largely the same code base as on the Mac so they would have the option of implementing color management if they chose to.

    If the world could get Safari and Firefox 3 to both treat an untagged image as if it really was tagged with full-on standard sRGB (so that it still uses the monitor profile), then you wouldn't have to add the inefficiency of adding sRGB profiles to all images and all existing images that are already untagged could immediately get better in a new browser. That would be best. I did not assume that it was possible to effect that kind of change so that wasn't in the gamut of the options I considered. If you think that is possible, then that's definitely the best option. I wonder what Firefox 3 has currently implemented (or plans to implement) in this regard.

    I do think that once we have more color-managed options in use on the web, we will start to see more use of AdobeRGB on the web in some settings It won't be broad at first because adoption of color-managed browsers won't happen overnight, but I'd expect that it would start to pop up more than it is today. I could see a transition state where EZPrints starts accepting AdobeRGB images and you start keeping originals as AdobeRGB and just converting to sRGB for web display sizes, preserving the extra colors for printing which are thrown away today, but also preserving sRGB interoperability for the masses.

    It was only a few months ago that I broke my own full sRGB workflow and started to use ProPhotoRGB or AdobeRGB when I'm working on an image for my own printer (I just recently upgraded my own home printing capabilities) because it can definitely handle colors that exist in some of my images, but are outside of sRGB. I would think some Smugmug pros would want to start doing that too at some point in the near future without having to give up on using Smugmug for print fullfillment. Today, they can't do that. It's Smugmug with sRGB or AdobeRGB and no Smugmug.

    Until there's a reasonable penetration of color-managed browsers out there for Windows and until your printing services accept AdobeRGB images, I think you're doing the right thing by continuing to convert uploads to sRGB. The Windows world is not yet ready for AdobeRGB on the web. But, when those two things do happen (and I now believe they are going to happen), I think you will have a meaningful percentage of your higher-end users that will be looking to take advantage of AdobeRGB in Smugmug and you will want to be able to offer that rather than have them look elsewhere. Even then, it's probably an opt-in kind of feature where a user has to "turn it on" before you stop converting because you will need the user to tell you that they understand what they are doing.

    Can you get Apple to change Safari's behavior to truly assume sRGB when there's no profile? That would be great! It could probably lead to a Domino effect with Firefox and eventually with IE too.

    I would guess that Firefox 3 is early enough in the game that if we found the right folks who are championing color management in Firefox, they would listen to a good argument, particularly since it's not a lot of code to write, just a small logic step.
    --John
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  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 26, 2007
    onethumb wrote:
    I'm afraid I just did something I *never* do: I skipped reading a jfriend post entirely.

    Why? Because I'll bet that huge post was asking us to add sRGB ICC profiles on our images.

    If I'm right, we've been looking very closely at this for quite some time. The only logical conclusion, given the mess the browser and OS manufacturers have left us with, is to embed the profiles and say "screw bandwidth and speed, they keep getting faster and cheaper anyway". We're a very logical company, so I'll let you draw your own logical conclusions. ;)

    If I'm wrong, I apologize. Tell me so and I'll go back and read the post. :)

    What I wrote about is related to the Mac gamma issue, but there is still a problem even when the display is set to the right gamma and this problem occurs even on Windows computers that don't have an incorrect gamma alignment. It's related to the fact that when Safari (even Safari on Windows) encounters an untagged image, it does not use the monitor profile when displaying that image. If the monitor profile is not a perfect sRGB (which most are not), then you get a color shift when looking at an untagged sRGB image versus a tagged sRGB image because the untagged image is not color corrected for the monitor profile. This is what I discovered in Safari for Windows. This is a bummer for displaying accurate color.

    There are two ways to fix this. 1) Get all color-managed browsers to treat untagged images as full sRGB and properly use the monitor profile when displaying them or 2) Make all the images have proper sRGB profiles so the browsers will do the right thing with them. Either can work. I know Smugmug can do #2 itself on it's own images. #1 requires getting Apple, Mozilla and ultimately Microsoft to do the right thing in their browsers. That, I have no sense for whether it's possible.
    --John
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  • BaldyBaldy Registered Users, Super Moderators Posts: 2,853 moderator
    edited November 26, 2007
    We might have better luck getting to the Firefox team than to Apple. Maybe if they do the right thing, it will put pressure on the Safari team.

    Interfacing to printers is growing more challenging because there are more of them (like Blurb and Fotoflot) and because they're offering more products via inkjet (canvas prints, photobooks...).

    If wishes were horses...we'd be able to attach profiles on the fly depending on the user agent.
  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 26, 2007
    Baldy wrote:
    do we know how iPhone Safari does color management?)

    If someone with an iPhone wants to visit this page http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter and report the results, that would give us the first info on whether iPhone/Safari is color-managed.

    You should also remember that an Edge iPhone doesn't need to be the mobile design target for the next few years. I've got to believe we'll see HSDPA iPhones in 2008 sometime and that's a more meaningful mobile download speed design target for the next few years.

    Since you're using Flash now for slideshows, does anyone know what Adobe's plans are for color management in Flash?
    --John
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  • SheafSheaf Registered Users, SmugMug Product Team Posts: 775 SmugMug Employee
    edited November 26, 2007
    jfriend wrote:
    If someone with an iPhone wants to visit this page http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter and report the results, that would give us the first info on whether iPhone/Safari is color-managed.

    "The system does not support these ICC profiles."
    SmugMug Product Manager
  • arodneyarodney Registered Users Posts: 2,005 Major grins
    edited November 26, 2007
    jfriend wrote:
    But, the future is just around the corner.

    The future is wide gamut displays that don't resemble sRGB behavior. Now all the browsers that don't understand color management will really be messy.
    Now, what happens when this same Safari browser encounters an untagged image. It basically decides that it really knows nothing about the color space of this image so rather than doing any converting of it, it just sends the RAW RGB values from the image right to the screen. If the image is indeed sRGB (even though it isn't tagged as sRGB which is the case in Smugmug's generated image sizes), then the image won't be way off because most displays are relatively close to sRGB.

    I don't know about the Windows version, but on the Mac, Safari (all Apple software) assume untagged documents are in the display profile color space. I'm not super happy about this because in previous versions of OS X, we could actually tell ColorSync want to assume. We can't do that any longer so it seems like a feature lost. I'd prefer, for the time being that untagged documents be considered sRGB.

    Note, in Photoshop, the selection of a working space in the color settings is our mechanism for telling Photoshop what to assume for untagged documents. So if you set say, Adobe RGB (1998) as your RGB working space, all untagged RGB documents are assumed to be in that color space for previewing and conversions. It would be useful if, at the operating system level, we could do this with all or other applications.
    But, Safari will also skip converting the image to the monitor profile, so unless your monitor is perfect sRGB, you will not get an ideal display of that image.

    There's no conversion going on here. A conversion is taking one set of RGB values in one color space and converting it into another. What we want to do is leave the RGB numbers alone and alter the assigned profile.

    Also, you're going to be very hard pressed to ever find a true sRGB behaving LCD display. The sRGB color space is one based on a theoretical display, one using P22 CRT phosphors. They have very complex tone response curves, not simple gamma behavior. So, its not a good idea to assume you have a true sRGB display. You probably do not. It may have the gamut boundaries of sRGB but that's about it.
    Depending upon how far your monitor is from sRGB, you will see shifts in the image colors. If the image was properly tagged as sRGB, then Safari would understand it as sRGB and properly take into account your monitor profile and then Smugmug down-sized version would display exactly the same as the original.

    Safari is just operating like Photoshop and all other ICC aware applications. For this to happen, the application needs to understand what the RGB color space is and what the display profile is. That's done with two ICC profiles (or, if no profile, then there is that assumption about what the RGB numbers represent).
    But, you ask, how does display calibration fit into this? If you calibrate your display to sRGB, won't that fix all this and the image will display perfectly?

    Not really. And its not necessary (or really possible) to calibrate the display to this very exacting definition. Its actually easier. All you need to do is have an application that looks at the display profile and provides a unique compensation for that exact display. Think of it like having a set of CC filters you place over YOUR unique emulsion of film such that when its processed, it provides the correct color appearance. This is called Display Using Monitor Compensation. Every users display undergoes a unique compensation based on the display profile. So you don't have to try to force a display into a fixed behavior that's probably not possible. You have an application that "knows" the document is in sRGB (or any color space) and a display profile. It can then filter the signal if you will, such that the RGB numbers preview correctly. And better, the SAME RGB numbers on your display and my display, which are both different, preview the same way.
    As I discovered recently, calibrating your display is more about creating a monitor profile that accurately describes what colors your monitor produces than it is about actually adjusting the colors of your monitor to some standard.

    Exactly, this is what Display Using Monitor Compensation does. The profile is far more important than the actual state of the display. The profile needs to correctly "fingerprint" the behavior.
    So ... the consquences of display an untagged sRGB image in a color-aware browser like Safari or Firefox 3 is that the monitor profile is not used and the display of the image is NOT adjusted for the biases of the monitor.

    Its RGB mystery meat. Not only isn't the display profile being used, the RGB numbers are undefined. This browser sees say R23/B128/G98 the same if the document is in sRGB, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB. It has a set of numbers, but not the SCALE of the numbers (the color space).
    The image colors are degraded, even when the source image was sRGB.

    I don't love the word degraded. Undefined is better. Its like someone speaking a language you don't understand.
    You might ask, why does Safari not use the monitor profile when the image is not tagged. I don't know why they did it this way, but it is the way it is and it's been that way on the Mac for a long time so it's unlikely to change so we just have to deal with it that way

    Safari does use the display profile, it just doesn't really know what to assume for the untagged document. As I said, in Photoshop (and older versions of OS X) you the user could tell the application this. "IF you get an untagged document, assume its sRGB or My display profile or ProPhoto RGB." if the assumption is correct, the preview is correct. Again, you need two ICC profiles to produce any kind of conversion (even for the display which is a soft proof): the source (this document is in this or that color space) and the destination (now show me the numbers as they should appear on this device. Assume sRGB as the source, use the display profile as the destination. You always have to have two profiles.
    I can understand some logic that says if we don't know what colorspace it's in, then we really shouldn't muss with the colors at all and that's what it is doing.

    If you don't know the color space, you have to guess, the guess is either correct (color appearance is correct) or its not (color appearance is incorrect).
    The unfortunate side affect of this is that the image appears to be treated as if it's tagged with the monitor profile, not sRGB.

    Yes, I can say on the Mac, with Safari, untagged documents are assumed to be in the display profile color space. Kind of dumb.
    You might wonder about monitor profiles. Do you only have a monitor profile is you have profiled your monitor with a hardware profiler like Eye-One Display? No, nearly all display manufacturers offer a "stock" monitor profile that describes their typical monitor performance. If you buy a whole system from someone like HP or Dell, your system should come already installed with that OEM monitor profile. It's probably not that far off, particularly when the display is new and your lighting conditions are not unusual.

    Here I disagree. Of all the canned profiles, those that are often totally useless are display profiles. Displays are very unstable devices. They alter their behavior over time. They get weaker (in terms of luminance) as they age. If you alter any control on the display, the profile you thought described this display is now useless. Canned display profiles are useless.
    Andrew Rodney
    Author "Color Management for Photographers"
    http://www.digitaldog.net/
  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 27, 2007
    arodney wrote:
    The future is wide gamut displays that don't resemble sRGB behavior. Now all the browsers that don't understand color management will really be messy.

    It sounds like we all agree that it's dumb for Safari on both Mac and Windows (I can confirm it works this way on Windows too) to assume the monitor profile for an untagged image. While anything is a guess, the monitor profile is almost never a correct guess and sRGB would be a correct guess quite often on the web. Andrew, do you have any idea why Apple insists on doing it this way? Or how to influence them to change it?

    The point of my original posting was to make a case for Smugmug including ICC profiles in the generated image sizes (except maybe the thumbs) so that color managed browsers can do the right thing. What do you think of that direction Andrew? It has the cost of more storage space for Smugmug, increased bandwidth usage and a little slower image download.

    Also, is it possible to include an sRGB tag in an image that identifies it as being in the standard sRGB profile without including the actual profile and its multiple kbytes? That is Smugmug's conundrum. They don't want to slow down the web experience by having large ICC profiles in every image if they don't have to. I know it would be technically possible because the sRGB ICC profile is a standard and is known, but I don't know if the standard file format allows for that or if the software that reads it (like Safari) would understand just a single tag without the whole profile. If something like this is possible, that would be the best of both worlds. The image would be tagged sRGB, but wouldn't grow a lot in size. Any idea if this can be done? Or does the entire ICC profile have to be embedded even though it's the same in every sRGB image?

    It's an interesting coincidence that you should drop into this thread Andrew because I just read through your color management book on a 6-1/2 hour flight. I recognize the phrases in your response from the book: "mystery meat", "Monitor compensation", etc... I actually bought the book some time ago, but it sat unopened for a little while. My recent foray into trying to solve some of my color management issues and set up a new monitor, computer and printer got me to crack it open.

    The first half of the book is a good read. I haven't advanced to making custom profiles for my printer or camera or scanner so I wasn't ready for some of the later chapters.

    I already had accumulated a decent basic understanding of how all this works and I used the book to fill in the gaps and I enjoyed hearing a little bit about how Photoshop evolved over the years. The best part for me was the discussion of rendering intents because I didn't really understand the differences between them. I would have enjoyed some sample images that illustrate what kinds of images match up well with the different rendering intents. You described it in words, but a few pictures could have been powerful.

    I'm amazed at how messy it is to get all this right as a user. Though color management has been around for a few years now, it still seems like the software is in it's early childhood. I understand how it all conceptually works so I can now do it, but this is not something that most our our population can easily master. Our software is still really in the dark ages. It sounds like the Mac is a little better than Windows, but both still require you to know a lot in order to not make mistakes and to get things configured properly. I was really surprised at how much manual setup you have to do just to get a home print made that has Photoshop managing the colors, has the right paper/printer profile, has color management off in the print driver, has the right media type selected in the print driver for the right ink strategy, has the right options selected in the driver for the highest quality photographic print, etc....

    It seems like I should be able to pick my paper by manufacturer and paper type, have it automatically fetch the ICC profile from a web service if it's not already local, tell it I want the highest quality photographic print for that printer/paper combination and say go. The combination of Photoshop, print driver and OS should do all the rest of the coordination. No such luck.
    --John
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  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 27, 2007
    Sheaf wrote:
    "The system does not support these ICC profiles."

    Hmmm. No color management on the iPhone I guess. Perhaps not surprising, but too bad.
    --John
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  • arodneyarodney Registered Users Posts: 2,005 Major grins
    edited November 27, 2007
    Andrew, do you have any idea why Apple insists on doing it this way? Or how to influence them to change it?

    I don't know why, its a silly concept that nearly every color geek I know dismisses. It will hurt a lot more when we all move away from sRGB. That's going to be a few years. And no, you don't influence Apple! That's why Aperture is kind of a mess and Lightroom, built by a company that does ask users their opinions is doing so well. That's another story.
    Also, is it possible to include an sRGB tag in an image that identifies it as being in the standard sRGB profile without including the actual profile and its multiple kbytes? That is Smugmug's conundrum.

    There's probably some EXIF tag that is could be used but would Safari use it? And we're only talking about 4K of data (the sRGB profile). Yes, I know when you're talking about millions of images, it adds up. Still...
    They don't want to slow down the web experience by having large ICC profiles in every image if they don't have to.

    4K isn't going to. Jeeze, lower the size limit of images by 5K and compensate. This is a non issue IMHO.
    Andrew Rodney
    Author "Color Management for Photographers"
    http://www.digitaldog.net/
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited November 27, 2007
    arodney wrote:
    4K isn't going to. Jeeze, lower the size limit of images by 5K and compensate. This is a non issue IMHO.

    It had been a huge issue in the past. People want speed, fast pages. But now, connections are faster and it's less of an issue. But still, you could be talking about a hundred thumbs on a page and a huge main image, if your display is big enough, and that's now 400Kb :)

    But we still hope to do it.
  • arodneyarodney Registered Users Posts: 2,005 Major grins
    edited November 27, 2007
    Andy wrote:
    It had been a huge issue in the past. People want speed, fast pages. But now, connections are faster and it's less of an issue. But still, you could be talking about a hundred thumbs on a page and a huge main image, if your display is big enough, and that's now 400Kb :)

    But we still hope to do it.

    What you do is leave the profiles off the thumbs (which I assume you build from the original higher rez images) and embed the 4K in the larger images where proper color appearance is key.

    And even 400K, short of someone on dial-up (why are they looking at images?) isn't a huge, big deal.

    This reminds me a bit about what I saw on the news the other day regarding digital TV signals starting in 2009. Those old Rabbit hears will not fly. What busts my gut is the US Government is going to pay for decoder boxes and adds to let people know about them. As if watching TV is as necessary as electricity and water. Anyway, progress moves us forward. I don't know that we can account for every person who insists on using really really old technology (like dial up). And I live in the boonies, I only got high speed 3-4 years ago.
    Andrew Rodney
    Author "Color Management for Photographers"
    http://www.digitaldog.net/
  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 27, 2007
    arodney wrote:
    There's probably some EXIF tag that is could be used but would Safari use it? And we're only talking about 4K of data (the sRGB profile). Yes, I know when you're talking about millions of images, it adds up.

    I agree. If it's only 4k, then just add it to the main images M, L, XL, XL2, XL3 as we know that would work for all future color-managed browsers and will work in Safari today and Firefox 3 tomorrow without having to influence anyone to change. When the world starts moving past sRGB, the full profile will need to be there anyway.

    It might be worth an experiment to see if the EXIF tag for sRGB could work. Support for that might be less sound so perhaps Smugmug only uses this tag on thumbs so if the browser understands the tag, then even the thumbs get color-managed to sRGB so they get monitor compensation.

    For all the existing Smugmug images that don't have this tagging, it's probably worth a foray to find out what the Firefox 3 implementation is doing and try to influence it to assume sRGB if no tag. Heck, we could probably even find someone to contribute the few lines of code that are probably involved to do this right.
    --John
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  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 28, 2007
    Other ways to solve this problem?
    Here's some relevant info I found by doing a little experimentation and poking around with Google:

    In a test of one image I had lying around that does not have an embedded ICC profile, but does have the EXIF tag set to sRGB, it does not look like the Safari for Windows beta does monitor compensation in this situation. If I load this image into both Safari and Photoshop, they do not look identical. If I then save the sRGB profile into the image in Photoshop and then look at it in Safari and Photoshop, they are identical. So Safari is not looking at the EXIF tag for sRGB. Darn, that would have been nice since that tag is only a few bytes long.

    Here's the Firefox page that discusses color profile support in Firefox 3: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/colorsync/.

    There are some interesting things in the Firefox page. For one, they are supporting the specification of a color profile in both the <*body*> tag (affects the whole page) and in an <*img*> tag (affects just that image). This means that the icc profile can be downloaded once when first specified and then cached for all subsequent uses. This could solve the storage and bandwidth issues and even make it practical to specify it for thumbs - if other browsers are going to support this too.

    Further, this posting from the Apple colorsync mailing list seems to say that Safari already supports the iccprofile attribute on the <body> tag. I haven't tried it to verify. That might be a promising way to go since Firefox 3 is also going to support it and this would cause thumbs to render properly without having to include the iccprofile in each image.

    And, there's a proposal to add ICC profile support to CSS too.
    --John
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  • arodneyarodney Registered Users Posts: 2,005 Major grins
    edited November 28, 2007
    jfriend wrote:
    For one, they are supporting the specification of a color profile in both the <body> tag (affects the whole page) and in an <img> tag (affects just that image).

    This is really the way to be working, describe the entire page, not the individual images.
    Andrew Rodney
    Author "Color Management for Photographers"
    http://www.digitaldog.net/
  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 28, 2007
    Firefox 3 will assume untagged images are sRGB
    More info on the Firefox 3 implementation.

    According to the bug that is the tracking/discussion vehicle for the new feature in Firefox 3, all untagged images will be assumed to be sRGB and will get monitor profile compensation.

    This is a quote from the bug: "The current implementation assumes sRGB on everything (excluding plugins -- which we don't touch) that isn't tagged and transforms those colors to the monitor profile."

    There's also some discussion in that bug about why Safari doesn't assume sRGB and do monitor compensation for untagged images. It had to do with matching colors with Flash.

    There's also a curious comment that suggests that Safari is going to start assuming untagged content is sRGB and applying monitor compensation to it, but not until Flash gets color management. I have no idea when that is.

    It is unclear whether Firefox 3 will ship with color management enabled by default or not.
    --John
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  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 28, 2007
    Safari/Leopard does support sRGB EXIF tag
    Hmmm. Appple says here that with Safari in Leopard, Safari now does recognize the sRGB EXIF tag used by most popular digital cameras. This implies that it apply color management when just the EXIF tag is present on Mac. Since these Mac features seem to be coming to Windows, perhaps a future beta release on Windows will have this too. I don't have a Mac with Leopard to try it on.
    --John
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  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 29, 2007
    Is this a solution to the Mac gamma issue?
    jfriend wrote:
    Hmmm. Appple says here that with Safari in Leopard, Safari now does recognize the sRGB EXIF tag used by most popular digital cameras. This implies that it apply color management when just the EXIF tag is present on Mac. Since these Mac features seem to be coming to Windows, perhaps a future beta release on Windows will have this too. I don't have a Mac with Leopard to try it on.

    As I was thinking about this further, if Safari in Leopard really does recognize the sRGB EXIF tag and do monitor compensation when it sees that tag, it seems like this IS the solution to the Mac 1.8 gamma issue for Safari. Just put that single, tiny EXIF tag into all images and Safari should do proper monitor compensation. That isn't the solution to the larger issue I posted about here (I want a solution for that on Windows), but it might solve the particular Mac gamma issue for Safari. Further, it's probably not hard to influence Firefox 3 to do the same since they are already discussing it and probably just need some more nudging and seem interesting in learning from what Safari does.
    --John
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  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited November 30, 2007
    Woah. I have full color management in Safari on one of my Smugmug galleries. The gallery images seem to now have sRGB ICC profiles on them. Is this an experiment? A change taking place?

    This XL2-sized image has what appears to be full EXIF data on it (which is very cool). It is showing a wide range of fields including description, keywords, most of the regular shooting data, etc... I think it's everything that was on the original. I checked a couple other images in that gallery and they appear to have EXIF on them too. I checked a different gallery in a different account and no data there.

    Even more amazing, that same image as an sRGB color profile on it and is now properly color managed with monitor compensation in Safari for Windows. Safari for Windows now looks exactly the same as Photoshop. Very Cool!

    Is something being changed here that will apply broadly (this would be a cool change)?
    --John
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  • SheafSheaf Registered Users, SmugMug Product Team Posts: 775 SmugMug Employee
    edited December 28, 2007
    onethumb wrote:
    ...We've been looking very closely at this for quite some time. The only logical conclusion, given the mess the browser and OS manufacturers have left us with, is to embed the profiles and say "screw bandwidth and speed, they keep getting faster and cheaper anyway". We're a very logical company, so I'll let you draw your own logical conclusions. ;)

    Logic has won out. We now embed the profiles in all images larger than "thumb" size.

    As with SmugMungous, we only do this on images that get processed from here on out.
    SmugMug Product Manager
  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited December 28, 2007
    Sheaf wrote:
    Logic has won out. We now embed the profiles in all images larger than "thumb" size.

    As with SmugMungous, we only do this on images that get processed from here on out.

    Totally awesome! Thanks. Now, I'm going to have to switch to either Safari or the color managed Firefox beta.

    What's the best way to trigger profiles being added on important galleries? Double rotate?
    --John
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  • timnosenzotimnosenzo Registered Users Posts: 405 Major grins
    edited December 28, 2007
    Sheaf wrote:
    Logic has won out. We now embed the profiles in all images larger than "thumb" size.

    As with SmugMungous, we only do this on images that get processed from here on out.

    WooHoo!!! clap.gif
  • BaldyBaldy Registered Users, Super Moderators Posts: 2,853 moderator
    edited December 29, 2007
    jfriend wrote:
    Totally awesome! Thanks. Now, I'm going to have to switch to either Safari or the color managed Firefox beta.
    Hmmm.... We didn't expect the shift from thumbs to display images to be so dramatic on some Macs. Customers automatically assume we just broke the site. For an example, look at the comments on the release notes blog this a.m.:

    http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/2007/12/28/hide-photo-feature-unveiled/#comments

    Here's a screen shot of my random Mac lappy, which has never been modified from the factory:

    237182610-O.png

    This could be a big problem for us. If we add ICC profiles to the thumbs, it will add a lot of weight to them and a lot of people are gonna start complaining about speed. If we have to wade in the Apple display swamp, which is too much for even very savvy color people to understand, there will be much angst. And 9 of 10 people who see this will just assume SmugMug is broken and won't see anything we post about it.
  • georgesgeorges Registered Users Posts: 138 Major grins
    edited December 29, 2007
    what a mess...
    Baldy -

    You know, it's hard to go wrong by shooting for the lowest common denominator.

    I know this rubs some of the more advanced folks the wrong way, but I'd much rather continue along the non-color managed path.

    When it comes to color managment, the grand majority of web users have no clue. Take a look at monitor settings when you visit your non-photographer friends. Most will likely be set to max brightness and max contrast. (and probably came from set that way from the factory.)

    Maybe my friends are unusually unaware, but I doubt it.

    As bad as it sounds, the lowest common denominator is probably the best answer in this case.

    GS
    See you later, gs

    http://georgesphotos.net
  • jfriendjfriend Registered Users Posts: 8,097 Major grins
    edited December 29, 2007
    Baldy wrote:
    Hmmm.... We didn't expect the shift from thumbs to display images to be so dramatic on some Macs. Customers automatically assume we just broke the site. For an example, look at the comments on the release notes blog this a.m.:

    http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/2007/12/28/hide-photo-feature-unveiled/#comments

    Here's a screen shot of my random Mac lappy, which has never been modified from the factory:

    This could be a big problem for us. If we add ICC profiles to the thumbs, it will add a lot of weight to them and a lot of people are gonna start complaining about speed. If we have to wade in the Apple display swamp, which is too much for even very savvy color people to understand, there will be much angst. And 9 of 10 people who see this will just assume SmugMug is broken and won't see anything we post about it.

    Did you see if Safari responds to the experimental attributes on the IMG tag that can specify the ICC profile as a URL without actually including it in every thumb? Since it's the same ICC profile for everything, it's also cached effectively by the browser. I don't have the ability to test whether it works or not, but you guys could try it out. I mentioned it in the earlier thread where I was offering ideas on this.

    There are also proposed CSS attributes for color space. It seems like the big win would be if Safari responds to either of these choices, then you could apply an ICC profile to the thumbs without actually including it in them.
    --John
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  • arodneyarodney Registered Users Posts: 2,005 Major grins
    edited December 29, 2007
    Baldy wrote:
    Hmmm.... We didn't expect the shift from thumbs to display images to be so dramatic on some Macs.

    This could be a big problem for us. If we add ICC profiles to the thumbs, it will add a lot of weight to them and a lot of people are gonna start complaining about speed. If we have to wade in the Apple display swamp, which is too much for even very savvy color people to understand, there will be much angst. And 9 of 10 people who see this will just assume SmugMug is broken and won't see anything we post about it.

    Just inform the user that these are non color managed thumbnails just below them, (they will either understand or ignore that bit), then say something like "Click on the thumbnail to see the true color" or something to that effect. As long as you tell the user what he's seeing, you're in much better shape.
    Andrew Rodney
    Author "Color Management for Photographers"
    http://www.digitaldog.net/
  • SheafSheaf Registered Users, SmugMug Product Team Posts: 775 SmugMug Employee
    edited December 29, 2007
    arodney wrote:
    Just inform the user that these are non color managed thumbnails just below them, (they will either understand or ignore that bit), then say something like "Click on the thumbnail to see the true color" or something to that effect. As long as you tell the user what he's seeing, you're in much better shape.

    That's quite a bit of text to put on every single gallery page. Especially since it only affects a small number of people and even fewer of those would understand it.
    SmugMug Product Manager
  • arodneyarodney Registered Users Posts: 2,005 Major grins
    edited December 29, 2007
    Sheaf wrote:
    That's quite a bit of text to put on every single gallery page. Especially since it only affects a small number of people and even fewer of those would understand it.

    You can tell them nothing and just wait until they ask you why the two don't match and then answer them. Your call.
    Andrew Rodney
    Author "Color Management for Photographers"
    http://www.digitaldog.net/
  • AndyAndy Registered Users Posts: 50,016 Major grins
    edited December 29, 2007
    arodney wrote:
    Just inform the user that these are non color managed thumbnails
    But 99.99 percent of the people looking have 100 percent of "no clue" what this would ever mean naughty.gif

    No, this would not be good IMO....
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