ICC Profiles and the Smug

Balls187

What are Smugmug's recommend best practices regarding ICC color profiles?

I have my color profile attached to my images, and it looks great in Safari and Firefox with color management turned on. On non color managed browsers the images look overly saturated.

So, does smugmug have a recommendedation with regards to using ICC profiles with images placed on Smugmug?

And as a followup:

Can we get ICC profiles attached to image thumbnails?

Andy

No need to attach a profile. Upload sRGB images for the web and our lab.

We're not adding them to thumbs, it nearly doubles the size....

Balls187

Andy wrote: »

No need to attach a profile. Upload sRGB images for the web and our lab.

We're not adding them to thumbs, it nearly doubles the size....

Okay, I have Adobe Lightroom set to export the images as sRGB. I'm confused why my thumbs look over saturated compared to the actual image (in Firefox 3)

Okay me am dumb. I switched my monitor profile to srgb, and now my thumbs look like my images. Which is to say, terrible

jfriend

Balls187 wrote: »

Okay, I have Adobe Lightroom set to export the images as sRGB. I'm confused why my thumbs look over saturated compared to the actual image (in Firefox 3)

Okay me am dumb. I switched my monitor profile to srgb, and now my thumbs look like my images. Which is to say, terrible

Your monitor profile should NEVER be sRGB. It should be a profile appropriate for your monitor. The profile is a recipe for color-aware software programs that advises them how to show accurate color on that monitor.

If your monitor is more capable than sRGB (which most modern LCDs are these days), then thumbnails look different than non-thumbnails in Firefox because thumbnails are not color managed where as the other images are. The thumbnails are not color-managed because Smugmug does not include a color profile with them. You CANNOT change, fix or modify this without screwing up the color display of the main image. DO NOT ATTEMPT to change this. You will only mess things up.

When an sRGB image is displayed on a non-color-managed display that has a wider color gamut than sRGB (like many modern LCDs), it will look over saturated a bit. That is just a fact. When an image is not color managed, it is NOT correct to say that the browser assumes sRGB. The browser just dumps the bits of the image directly to the monitor without any color correction. The image will only look correct if the monitor happened to be an exact replica of sRGB which no monitor is and it is not possible to make an LCD monitor be such and you would not want to do so because you'd be ruining the richer color display of the monitor.

It is a fact of life that thumbnails will look different than the main image on a wide gamut LCD monitor, even when it's appropriately calibrated and profiled. We cannot do anything about that until Smugmug finds a way to make the thumbnails be color managed. Anything you try will mess up the color display of your main images.

Also, please be aware that what you see on your monitor for non-color-managed images has NOTHING to do with what someone else sees on theirs because a non-color-managed image displays differently on every monitor. Many people make the mistake of trying to optimize what they see on their display for non-color-managed images only to mess up their color-managed image display.

Balls187

jfriend wrote: »

Your monitor profile should NEVER be sRGB.

...

Thank you for a very detailed response.

If you might indulge my stupidity for a moment:

My monitor is color calibrated with a hardware colorimeter, but obviously my understanding is way off.

My images are tagged as sRGB, and if I recall correctly, smugmug auto-attaches the profile on the fly. Now I thought that if an image was untagged, the browser would assume it's sRGB. My disconnect is:

if my image is tagged sRGB, and my browser assumes all non-tagged images are sRGB, why is there a discrepancy between the thumbnails and the actual image? If they're both sRGB, shouldn't they look the same?

Perhaps I should give up on understanding color management and instead focus my peabrain on something much easier, like quantum mechanics.

jfriend

Balls187 wrote: »

Thank you for a very detailed response.

If you might indulge my stupidity for a moment:

My monitor is color calibrated with a hardware colorimeter, but obviously my understanding is way off.

My images are tagged as sRGB, and if I recall correctly, smugmug auto-attaches the profile on the fly. Now I thought that if an image was untagged, the browser would assume it's sRGB. My disconnect is:

if my image is tagged sRGB, and my browser assumes all non-tagged images are sRGB, why is there a discrepancy between the thumbnails and the actual image? If they're both sRGB, shouldn't they look the same?

Perhaps I should give up on understanding color management and instead focus my peabrain on something much easier, like quantum mechanics.

A non-color-managed browser or a color-managed browser with a non-tagged image does NOT assume the image is sRGB. It just dumps the image bits directly to the video card with no color management at all. So, what displays depends entirely upon the native color capabilities of the monitor. One of the newer wide gamut LCD images which has color capabilities beyond sRGB will display the image more saturated than normal.

It would be nice if one could configure a browser to treat non-color-tagged images as sRGB and then process them as color-managed sRGB from there, but that is not the case with any browser I know of. This is perhaps for backward compatibility with the 15 years of non-color-managed history with non-color tagged images.

ALL you need to do is:

1. Make sure your monitor is properly profiled and that profile is properly set in your system. This will give color managed applications the right recipe for displaying accurate color.
2. Make sure you only use color-managed applications when adjusting or evaluating your images on your own computer.
3. Upload sRGB images to Smugmug.

After that, what happens with non-color-managed thumbnails or what happens when someone uses a non-color-managed browser or uses any browser on a non-color-calibrated system is beyond your control and nothing you try to do to compensate from that will improve your images and will likely make them display worse on properly profiled systems. Just forget what happens in those circumstances. You cannot fix it. You cannot plan for it. You cannot even make it better (because everyone's non-profiled system is different and none have accurate color).

Once you are zen with the fact that your images will only have accurate color in some circumstances on some systems, then you can just focus your workflow on optimizing for accurate color on a calibrated/profiled system.

We all can and should insist that Smugmug continue to push for and find a solution for accurate color in thumbnails as this is ultimately a solvable problem. Efficiently solving it may require enhancements in the browser, but they should be pushing for a solution somehow because it does look amateurish to have thumbs with different colors than the main image.

Some ideas for possible solutions have been discussed on the web before such as not having to include a full size profile to tag a thumbnail that it's a particular sRGB. Or, allowing once to specify the color profile of an image with an attribute in the <img> tag or a CSS attribute so all thumbs can point to the same cachable profile. Or, allowing a meta tag that specifies that all untagged images in the page should be assumed to be a particular color profile.

Balls187

jfriend wrote: »

A non-color-managed browser or a color-managed browser with a non-tagged image does NOT assume the image is sRGB.
...

John,

Thank you very much for this wonderful explanation.

-Alan