For only 4% of our users? Let's think about this logically now The extra space needed would just not justify it at this point.
But don't you guys do some dynamic resizing anyway? I figured if you were resizing dynamically you might as well add profiles dynamically too, but maybe I was mistaken. But thinking about it after I wrote that, browser sniffing is nearly always the path to madness.
Don't get me wrong, I love Safari - it is my primary web browser that I use, and I am REALLY looking forward to Safari 3. But I think they may be headed in the wrong direction with regards to embedded profiles: it appears that the latest webkit treats jpg's with embedded profiles as if they did not have one. I have a test page set up and waiting for Baldy to confirm. If this is the case, it would be very bad news I thik.
This would be a tragedy. Say it ain't so. How did you arrive at this conclusion?
Constructive criticism always welcome!
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
Scenario: calibrate your monitor using a Huey and choose the photo editing/web browsing default. It will set your monitor to a gamma of 2.2 instead of the 1.8 that's default on the Mac. The good news is now sRGB images will be rendered as sRGB images without a profile. In other words. you're on a PC.
This, AFAIK is not true - there's more to sRGB than just gamma (gamut size, for one thing). I have my monitor calibrated to gamma 2.2, but images with no profile don't look like sRGB.
Constructive criticism always welcome!
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
This would be a tragedy. Say it ain't so. How did you arrive at this conclusion?
So I just tested this on my wife's powerbook which has never had webkit. And there was a difference when I hovered over things, so it looked like the profile was NOT being ignored.
So something is up with my webkit or monitor settings, I am trying to narrow it down. I have the debug menu enabled, which may also expose extra settings that may not be in to play on her machine.
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BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
Ok, so now I don't know what to think. Just today I had my first example of Safari making a total hash of things. This is an sRGB image with a profile, as seen in this thread (it's the last image in the thread):
On the left is Safari, in the middle is Photoshop (comes up the same in GraphicConverter and Preview), and on the right is Firefox. What is going on? It's massively oversaturated in Safari and slightly oversaturated in Firefox, which is the opposite of what normally happens. The screen grab image above also appears oversaturated.
Constructive criticism always welcome!
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
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BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
An sRGB image with and without a profile will likely look different in Safari! The image is in sRGB, but untagged, Safari assumes it's your display profile but tagged in assumes its in sRGB. Setting the monitor to sRGB is totally useless! It doesn't set it to sRGB (otherwise, why would you need a colorimeter to calibrate it?).
Mystery apparently solved.
When you change your monitor profile, you have to quit Safari and restart it. Once you do, setting the monitor to sRGB means you'll see no color shift between an sRGB image with profile and without. We've tested it on 3 Macs.
That's the way it's supposed to work. And not only that, but the HTML, CSS and Flash elements on the page, which are all sRGB-based, now render the correct colors in both Safari and Firefox, which they don't if you leave the monitor set to the default gamma of 1.8. And finally, Firefox and Safari now render the page the same.
When you change your monitor profile, you have to quit Safari and restart it. Once you do, setting the monitor to sRGB means you'll see no color shift between an sRGB image with profile and without. We've tested it on 3 Macs.
That's the way it's supposed to work. And not only that, but the HTML, CSS and Flash elements on the page, which are all sRGB-based, now render the correct colors in both Safari and Firefox, which they don't if you leave the monitor set to the default gamma of 1.8. And finally, Firefox and Safari now render the page the same.
So what should we do if we want a calibrated monitor?
Ok, so now I don't know what to think. Just today I had my first example of Safari making a total hash of things. This is an sRGB image with a profile, as seen in this thread (it's the last image in the thread):
On the left is Safari, in the middle is Photoshop (comes up the same in GraphicConverter and Preview), and on the right is Firefox. What is going on? It's massively oversaturated in Safari and slightly oversaturated in Firefox, which is the opposite of what normally happens. The screen grab image above also appears oversaturated.
I'm glad you picked skin tones to test this on because they are so critical. I'm preparing a bunch of examples with skin tones under various settings to show what gives.
This is good. We're getting to the bottom of it bit by bit.
So what should we do if we want a calibrated monitor?
Well. Calibrated on a PC always means a gamma of 2.2 (the sRGB, Adobe RGB, HTML, CSS and Flash standards).
When you calibrate a Mac, you have to specify the gamma. Their default is 1.8, but devices like Huey let you pick the setting and go to 2.2. To keep it simple, they don't confuse you with words like gamma, but depending on what setting you choose, 2.2 is the gamma you get. Explanation.
So what does gamma mean, anyway? They picked the word so it would sound like nuclear physics and your eyes would glaze over. Sometimes a simple explanation like brightness is given for it.
It's actually like a Photoshop curve. The black and white points don't change, just the colors in between. Half way between black and white they change the most, closer to black or white they change the least.
So if you just got a nice tan on the beach and you're close to halfway between black and white, you'll lose a few days of sun when viewed on a Mac with the default setting.
But if you're a very fair pantomimist with white makeup and black clothes, you on a Mac is you on a PC. Unless you have dashes of vibrant makeup like bright red lips; then your lips will be less vibrant on a Mac whose gamma is 1.8 but your skin and clothes will look the same.
Clear as mud?
You can fix the problem in two ways: (1) attach a profile to your images and watch them look like they're supposed to (like they do on a PC), but the rest of the page will still have incorrect colors, or, (2) tell your Huey to set your monitor gamma at 2.2, which fixes the photo and the rest of the page too. Since almost no images on the web have ICC profiles, (2) seems most practical, no?
I'm glad you picked skin tones to test this on because they are so critical. I'm preparing a bunch of examples with skin tones under various settings to show what gives.
Well, the thing I don't understand is why with this particular image Safari doesn't render the colours correctly even though it has a profile. It's the only image as far as I know where I've seen it do this. I also don't understand why this image becomes *more* saturated - it just doesn't make sense.
By the way, I just recalibrated my two monitors at home (laptop and external LCD), I'm using white point 6100K.
It's worth repeating that calibrating your monitor with gamma 2.2 will *not* be the same as using sRGB, although it's probably a good first step. As you commented above, Adobe RGB uses gamma 2.2 as well, and it's pretty different to sRGB. However if you can additionally set the black and white points to whatever sRGB defines that would probably be as close as any PC monitor.
I'm using the Eye-One, and in advanced mode it actually allows me to specify a target profile, so I could probably get to your option 2) exactly (i.e. actually have my monitor calibrated to sRGB). I have two problems with this option - modern monitors are capable of a much wider range which I'm pretty much wasting, and also it doesn't help me show my images to anyone else with a Mac.
Well, the thing I don't understand is why with this particular image Safari doesn't render the colours correctly even though it has a profile. It's the only image as far as I know where I've seen it do this. I also don't understand why this image becomes *more* saturated - it just doesn't make sense.
Ok, all is right with the world again. When I got home to check my monitor, Safari started displaying the colours correctly and Preview started displaying them totally washed out, I thought I was going crazy for a moment there.
My laptop is currently both my home and work machine, and I have external screens both at home and in the office. I set OSX to use the external screen as the main screen (with menubar etc) when it's connected. Of course, any ColourSync aware app will get the current profile when it starts up, as you commented above that means you need to restart Safari after changing the profile. But you also need to restart any ColourSync aware app after connecting an external monitor, since that will change the current primary profile! If you have such an app running when you connect the monitor, OSX will move the window to the new monitor but will leave it using the old profile.
One mystery solved.
Constructive criticism always welcome!
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
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BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
In my opinion, all this complexity stems from a very simple idea: we're trying to view a medium that calls for a white point of 6500 and a gamma of 2.2 on a device with white points and gammas set to something else.
Since we don't like how an image that assumes a white point of 6500 and gamma of 2.2 looks on our monitors that aren't set for viewing them, we try to attach something to our photos to tell the browser how to make an exception for that one object on the page.
But the browser can't make the same exception for the other design elements on the page, so we adjust one thing and leave the others. When they need to match, we're in trouble. If we need to see it the way the designer actually called for, or the TV producer expected in the case of video, we can't because we don't know how to attach things to those objects to make them adjust for a monitor they weren't designed for.
And we confuse the other apps. What is Photoshop to do? Show the sRGB images correctly until it gets to the save for web preview window and then take a wild guess at which browser you'll be using and preview it accordingly? That's what it does now, confounding thousands of users who don't userstand why their colors go south as soon as they hit save for web.
Actually, my problem isn't solved... the colours are still wrong with Safari on my external monitor, but ok with Preview, Photoshop, and everything else colour-aware. It seems that webkit always takes the profile from my laptop monitor, although I can't prove it (since there's no way to see what the active colour profile is in Safari). It definitely seems to be a webkit problem, Xyle Scope suffers from the same problem. I think it could be time to download webkit, build it and try it out myself.
Constructive criticism always welcome!
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
When you change your monitor profile, you have to quit Safari and restart it. Once you do, setting the monitor to sRGB means you'll see no color shift between an sRGB image with profile and without. We've tested it on 3 Macs.
That's the way it's supposed to work. And not only that, but the HTML, CSS and Flash elements on the page, which are all sRGB-based, now render the correct colors in both Safari and Firefox, which they don't if you leave the monitor set to the default gamma of 1.8. And finally, Firefox and Safari now render the page the same.
For what it's worth, this doesn't work on my machine. I decided I was going to calibrate to sRGB and be done with it, since I can't live without Firefox. So using my Eye-One I calibrated both my monitors to an sRGB profile. Curiously, this didn't seem to do anything - Eye-One seems to interpret using an sRGB profile as "just show me the pixels" - the curve is totally linear. I checked your test page after restarting Safari, on both monitors there was a significant shift still. I then calibrated to white point 6500, gamma 2.2, restarted Safari - same thing, the sRGB with profile pic is still a lot more saturated.
However, I'm honestly now at the point where I don't care - this is too difficult for something that should be trivial. At least now I know what my choices are - a useful browsing experience with washed out colours; or a worse browsing experience where the colours are right on my laptop monitor but ridiculously bad on my external monitor if people attach a profile, and are washed out on both if they don't.
Maybe I'll just get a PC.
Constructive criticism always welcome!
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
You can mouse over the upper left image to see how the image changes no matter how your monitor is set.
Here is another data point for your consideration. For me, setting my monitor to use 'sRGB IEC61966-2.1' (installed with Photoshop) makes it so that the image does not change at all. I've spent the last 15 minutes with my nose to the monitor verifying that this is true. Note that this is not the case when I set my monitor profile to be 'sRGB Profile' (what comes with OS X). In the case of 'sRGB Profile', the shift is much less pronounced than when I am using my monitor profile, but it is definitely there. I verified that "sRGB with profile" is, in fact, embedded with sRGB IEC61966-2.1.
I have posted the screen captures to my account and have named them according to the display profile used in the capture.
The color shift in the monitor profile capture ('Dell 2001FP') is very obvious. Look at the color charts.
The color shift in the 'sRGB Profile' is much, much more subtle. Look at the left end of the thing above the shish kabob skewer (light saber?), specifically in the small black section. You can see more detail in the "sRGB with profile" image.
As for the 'sRGB IEC61966-2.1' image, I'm quite certain there is no shift at all.
That's sounding pretty logical.
So I think this is what we tell customers and support desk people if we start attaching profiles:
1. The profile helps Safari make your photos look like they do on PCs, but not like they do in other Mac browsers.
However, it will appear in Safari as the creator intended, and it will only look like it does on PCs if it is the same profile that PCs assume (some sRGB).
2. If you have a banner, background image, or other JPEG design elements you use for customization, you'll need to host them somewhere else besides SmugMug if you want their color to match other design elements on the page. Or just let Safari users worry about it because no other browser on PCs or Mac will show a color shift. Or use gif images.
I'm not sure I understand this. As long as you are consistent with your profile usage, you will at least get consistent results within a browser, regardless of where anything is hosted. I am not a web designer, but is this difficult to manage?
3. Your photos will now closely match how they look in Photoshop, but not in Photoshop's Save For Web preview window, which shows how it will look in other Mac browsers.
I'm not sure I understand this either. As far as I can tell, the Save for Web preview shows what the image will look like if you were to strip the profile entirely. Assuming its default of not including a profile ('ICC Profile' unchecked), it will not make a difference whether or not Smugmug keeps the profile since the file itself will not have a profile (by default). In the case where the 'ICC Profile' is checked, then I understand, since it appears that the preview assumes that the profile will be stripped.
6. Your thumbnails will look like they do on Firefox on the Mac but larger images will look like they do in Firefox on the PC, because even Bill Atkinson won't attach profiles to his thumbnails because they become slower to load.
Agreed, the performance penalty on thumbnails is pretty clearly not worth it.
7. Some users will experience a performance penalty so Safari users can experience benefits 1-6, above.
I understand the sarcasm, but it's not fair to completely leave out the actual benefit, which is that Safari users will get to see pictures as they were intended by the creator.
I'm honestly not trying to be cynical, just trying to understand whose heads will explode if we do this and what we tell them. Hell hath no fury like a pro whose carefully-designed customization just got color shifts in Safari because we didn't think this through.
I sincerely appreciate the amount of effort you guys have put into this issue. I'll throw my two cents in and say that keeping profiles would reduce the number of times I'll have to explain to all my Safari-using visitors why my photos look washed out ("Trust me, they look better than that!").
Maybe a better thing to do is leave the profile attached to images that have them when uploaded so people have a choice. Then write a bl0g post to explain the morass, above.
It occurred to me that you were talking about just sticking an sRGB profile on all images, regardless of what they originally had attached. If that's the case, I'm less confused about some of the statements you make above. I think we can agree that doing this is a bad idea.
However, I think that giving members the option of preserving their profiles in their non-thumbnail images is a happy compromise. By default, you can strip profiles, preserving the current behavior. But if I know what I'm doing and actually like the fact that Safari obeys color profiles, it would be terrific if I could keep the profile intact!
All of this to get images to look like they do on a PC...
I think we can also agree that Safari should just assume sRGB for images without profiles. I can't imagine any scenario where it makes sense for it to assume no profile whatsoever and just let the user's local color environment wholly determine what gets seen. I've already requested this of Apple, but I doubt this is at the forefront of their concerns.
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BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
edited February 14, 2007
Okay, I really got serious and poured my heart into researching every aspect and making it as clear as I possibly could. There were a few sleepless nights and a lot of help from Onethumb, but here 'tis:
I'd love it if you could digg it (register for digg if you haven't already -- it's a great, great site). We want this flag raised high on the Apple pole. I used to work for Steve and I think the fix is so simple and compelling, they will act if we digg this story.
But does setting your gamma to 2.2 really solve ALL the problems? I've had my gamma set to 2.2 for years and years, but it seems it just reduces the problems. Sure, I agree that Apple should ship their systems at 2.2, but isn't there more to do?
Okay, I really got serious and poured my heart into researching every aspect and making it as clear as I possibly could. There were a few sleepless nights and a lot of help from Onethumb, but here 'tis:
In addition to the default gamma, what about having Safari assume sRGB [IEC61966-2.1] for images without profiles?
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BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
edited February 14, 2007
Thanks. Man, we're owning the front page of Digg with that story because the issue is so important to so many people. Well, Marissa Miller + iPod - clothing is getting more diggs. That's about photography too, tho, and composition I think.
Apple's abuzz about it and I think we're on the right track: it's an OS-level issue first, and browser issue second.
They are tricky waters that Safari has waded into and we're getting emails from the Safari team. If you assume sRGB IEC blah blah for any image on the page, you have to assume it for all images, including logos, etc. Then if you don't correct the CSS, HTML and Flash (which they have no way of correcting currently) you're screwed because colors won't match. If the monitor profile is set to sRGB IEC blah blah, then color mismatches are gone.
The issue you're facing David, same for me, is you want to calibrate your monitor and not use a default profile, so Safari is gonna do it's thing and get small color mismatches because your calibration isn't gonna be 100% accurate.
I coulda said all that better, sorry, but I'm late for my help desk shift. Lemme know if you want me to write this more clearly...
They are tricky waters that Safari has waded into and we're getting emails from the Safari team. If you assume sRGB IEC blah blah for any image on the page, you have to assume it for all images, including logos, etc. Then if you don't correct the CSS, HTML and Flash (which they have no way of correcting currently) you're screwed because colors won't match. If the monitor profile is set to sRGB IEC blah blah, then color mismatches are gone.
Safari is wading into the waters while everyone else is completely ignoring them. I don't think we should fault them for that .
After reading some of Dave Hyatt's postings, I now understand that Safari cannot do anything about Flash color, which I think is really the heart of the issue. If I understand correctly, Safari has the power to color correct and assume sRGB for everything else on the page.
Regardless, why not allow optional preservation of the profile on SmugMug? I'm not designing any webpages where elements have to match. I don't like setting my own monitor profile to sRGB IEC... where everything looks kind of blue (as suggested by the blog entry). I just have a lot of Mac-using friends that do not see what I intended.
How about this?
1. A user-specific setting that specifies whether profiles should be preserved.
2. The default will be that profiles will not be preserved, along with a recommendation and warning not to mess with it (maybe like the Auto vs. True color warning). It could also have a link to one or more of these blog entries about the issue.
3. If a user flags that she wants profiles to be preserved, they are preserved for all sizes but thumbnails.
I'm assuming a few things with this proposal. First, I'm assuming that the stripping of profiles happens near the upload and that it would be difficult and slow to handle it dynamically later on. For example, I am assuming that it would be difficult to have a checkbox that says "Use attached profile" after the photo has been uploaded and processed. I'm also assuming that you want to keep this away from the vast majority of people who do not care at all about this issue. I am assuming that it is easier to do this at the user level (w.r.t. UI) than at the gallery or photo level. Finally, I am assuming that what has already been stated about the performance implications of profiles on thumbnails still holds.
This gives no change in default behavior. I think it probably gives small changes to processing pipelines. But it makes me and others like me very happy .
Again, I reiterate that I really appreciate the effort you guys have put into this.
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BaldyRegistered Users, Super ModeratorsPosts: 2,853moderator
edited February 15, 2007
Thanks, jjc, I think your proposal makes sense. We really don't mind the extra bytes in larger-than-thumbnail jpegs because they won't do too much to make users perceive a slowdown.
Jeffrey Friedl asked them a reasonable question on their blog: why not have Safari react to a tag in the photo (like Photoshop does) instead of requiring a profile. If they did that, we wouldn't need the profile and it would work for thumbs too.
We hesitated to add profiles because we heard from them that they were going to do the correction, but as Dave Hyatt mentioned in our blog, they had to pull it back out because the bug reports kept streaming in.
So maybe until Apple does something else we can start adding the profiles to larger than thumbs.
Hi guys. I'm a new member -- I actually joined because I ran across this thread last night. I think it's great that people are discussing this issue. However, there are a couple significant things that have been said that are not accurate, and I think I can help out fix most people's problems. It *is* possible to generate images that include a color profile and display properly and identically across Safari, Firefox, Camino, and Windows machines. Also, Baldy's advice to set your Mac display profile to sRGB is wrong. Though I understand his motivation for making that recommendation, it only works for web publishing and is a disaster for anyone needing a properly calibrated and color-managed workflow for print.
First, to cut to the chase, here is a web page that displays properly across multiple browsers including Safari. The display will be identical in all those browsers provided your monitor profile uses gamma 2.2, however the specific monitor calibration you use doesn't matter (this is a good thing, obviously, since you have the freedom to calibrate your monitor): http://thompson.chris.googlepages.com/safariisnotwonky
Sorry for borrowing Baldy's sample image. I hope he doesn't mind. If he does I'll take it down. The title is meant to be a tongue-in-cheek reaction to his sample page. Also note that one of the images *doesn't have* an embedded profile and still displays properly in Safari.
I have attached an AppleScript which takes an image with any embedded profile and munges it so that it will appear correctly across browsers. You can either run it or compile it as an application and then drop images onto it. Note that it alters the image data so make a copy of images before you use it.
This solves most color-related workflow problems for web publishing. For instance, normally, if you set up a calibrated monitor profile, edit a photo in Lightroom, then export to sRGB, you'll find that even when your monitor uses gamma 2.2, the custom caibration curves you edited for cause the image to look different (usually washed out) in non-color managed browsers like Camino or Firefox or on Windows. Just run my script on your images after exporting from Lightroom and you'll no longer have this problem. *And* they'll look right in a properly color managed browser like Safari as well.
I can explain more about how this works tomorrow if anyone is interested.
You can make the same image appear identically on YOUR system but everyone else's? Nope, I don't buy it. Without a display profile being used to compensate for each display, like we have in ICC aware applications, all users will (could) see the same numbers differently.
Having identical RGB values appear the same though your display isn't the issue or difficult. In fact Photoshop shows you this as well in its soft proof options. But multiple users have no guarantee that the same numbers will appear the same way without a ICC aware browser.
Does the preview in Photoshop look identical to all browsers (aside from say Safari which does behave correctly)? View the images at 100%.
You can make the same image appear identically on YOUR system but everyone else's? Nope, I don't buy it. Without a display profile being used to compensate for each display, like we have in ICC aware applications, all users will (could) see the same numbers differently.
That's not what I was saying. Of course you can't make color fully consistent across multiple computers without color management. No one would seriously make that claim.
That's not what I was saying. Of course you can't make color fully consistent across multiple computers without color management. No one would seriously make that claim.
OK I want to be sure I understand you point.
You can of course make multiple users see the same color appearance if you use Safari. It treats the images like Photoshop.
If you want to make multiple browsers on your computer show the same preview (which I'm not sure how useful that is), then that's not difficult.
Comments
But don't you guys do some dynamic resizing anyway? I figured if you were resizing dynamically you might as well add profiles dynamically too, but maybe I was mistaken. But thinking about it after I wrote that, browser sniffing is nearly always the path to madness.
This would be a tragedy. Say it ain't so. How did you arrive at this conclusion?
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
This, AFAIK is not true - there's more to sRGB than just gamma (gamut size, for one thing). I have my monitor calibrated to gamma 2.2, but images with no profile don't look like sRGB.
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
So I just tested this on my wife's powerbook which has never had webkit. And there was a difference when I hovered over things, so it looked like the profile was NOT being ignored.
So something is up with my webkit or monitor settings, I am trying to narrow it down. I have the debug menu enabled, which may also expose extra settings that may not be in to play on her machine.
Hmm, I don't know, whatever the default for the Eye-One is. I'll check at home tonight.
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
On the left is Safari, in the middle is Photoshop (comes up the same in GraphicConverter and Preview), and on the right is Firefox. What is going on? It's massively oversaturated in Safari and slightly oversaturated in Firefox, which is the opposite of what normally happens. The screen grab image above also appears oversaturated.
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
When you change your monitor profile, you have to quit Safari and restart it. Once you do, setting the monitor to sRGB means you'll see no color shift between an sRGB image with profile and without. We've tested it on 3 Macs.
That's the way it's supposed to work. And not only that, but the HTML, CSS and Flash elements on the page, which are all sRGB-based, now render the correct colors in both Safari and Firefox, which they don't if you leave the monitor set to the default gamma of 1.8. And finally, Firefox and Safari now render the page the same.
So what should we do if we want a calibrated monitor?
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
This is good. We're getting to the bottom of it bit by bit.
When you calibrate a Mac, you have to specify the gamma. Their default is 1.8, but devices like Huey let you pick the setting and go to 2.2. To keep it simple, they don't confuse you with words like gamma, but depending on what setting you choose, 2.2 is the gamma you get. Explanation.
So what does gamma mean, anyway? They picked the word so it would sound like nuclear physics and your eyes would glaze over. Sometimes a simple explanation like brightness is given for it.
It's actually like a Photoshop curve. The black and white points don't change, just the colors in between. Half way between black and white they change the most, closer to black or white they change the least.
So if you just got a nice tan on the beach and you're close to halfway between black and white, you'll lose a few days of sun when viewed on a Mac with the default setting.
But if you're a very fair pantomimist with white makeup and black clothes, you on a Mac is you on a PC. Unless you have dashes of vibrant makeup like bright red lips; then your lips will be less vibrant on a Mac whose gamma is 1.8 but your skin and clothes will look the same.
Clear as mud?
You can fix the problem in two ways: (1) attach a profile to your images and watch them look like they're supposed to (like they do on a PC), but the rest of the page will still have incorrect colors, or, (2) tell your Huey to set your monitor gamma at 2.2, which fixes the photo and the rest of the page too. Since almost no images on the web have ICC profiles, (2) seems most practical, no?
Well, the thing I don't understand is why with this particular image Safari doesn't render the colours correctly even though it has a profile. It's the only image as far as I know where I've seen it do this. I also don't understand why this image becomes *more* saturated - it just doesn't make sense.
By the way, I just recalibrated my two monitors at home (laptop and external LCD), I'm using white point 6100K.
It's worth repeating that calibrating your monitor with gamma 2.2 will *not* be the same as using sRGB, although it's probably a good first step. As you commented above, Adobe RGB uses gamma 2.2 as well, and it's pretty different to sRGB. However if you can additionally set the black and white points to whatever sRGB defines that would probably be as close as any PC monitor.
I'm using the Eye-One, and in advanced mode it actually allows me to specify a target profile, so I could probably get to your option 2) exactly (i.e. actually have my monitor calibrated to sRGB). I have two problems with this option - modern monitors are capable of a much wider range which I'm pretty much wasting, and also it doesn't help me show my images to anyone else with a Mac.
I must admit I feel more confused every day with this!
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
Ok, all is right with the world again. When I got home to check my monitor, Safari started displaying the colours correctly and Preview started displaying them totally washed out, I thought I was going crazy for a moment there.
My laptop is currently both my home and work machine, and I have external screens both at home and in the office. I set OSX to use the external screen as the main screen (with menubar etc) when it's connected. Of course, any ColourSync aware app will get the current profile when it starts up, as you commented above that means you need to restart Safari after changing the profile. But you also need to restart any ColourSync aware app after connecting an external monitor, since that will change the current primary profile! If you have such an app running when you connect the monitor, OSX will move the window to the new monitor but will leave it using the old profile.
One mystery solved.
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
In my opinion, all this complexity stems from a very simple idea: we're trying to view a medium that calls for a white point of 6500 and a gamma of 2.2 on a device with white points and gammas set to something else.
Since we don't like how an image that assumes a white point of 6500 and gamma of 2.2 looks on our monitors that aren't set for viewing them, we try to attach something to our photos to tell the browser how to make an exception for that one object on the page.
But the browser can't make the same exception for the other design elements on the page, so we adjust one thing and leave the others. When they need to match, we're in trouble. If we need to see it the way the designer actually called for, or the TV producer expected in the case of video, we can't because we don't know how to attach things to those objects to make them adjust for a monitor they weren't designed for.
And we confuse the other apps. What is Photoshop to do? Show the sRGB images correctly until it gets to the save for web preview window and then take a wild guess at which browser you'll be using and preview it accordingly? That's what it does now, confounding thousands of users who don't userstand why their colors go south as soon as they hit save for web.
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
For what it's worth, this doesn't work on my machine. I decided I was going to calibrate to sRGB and be done with it, since I can't live without Firefox. So using my Eye-One I calibrated both my monitors to an sRGB profile. Curiously, this didn't seem to do anything - Eye-One seems to interpret using an sRGB profile as "just show me the pixels" - the curve is totally linear. I checked your test page after restarting Safari, on both monitors there was a significant shift still. I then calibrated to white point 6500, gamma 2.2, restarted Safari - same thing, the sRGB with profile pic is still a lot more saturated.
However, I'm honestly now at the point where I don't care - this is too difficult for something that should be trivial. At least now I know what my choices are - a useful browsing experience with washed out colours; or a worse browsing experience where the colours are right on my laptop monitor but ridiculously bad on my external monitor if people attach a profile, and are washed out on both if they don't.
Maybe I'll just get a PC.
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius
Here is another data point for your consideration. For me, setting my monitor to use 'sRGB IEC61966-2.1' (installed with Photoshop) makes it so that the image does not change at all. I've spent the last 15 minutes with my nose to the monitor verifying that this is true. Note that this is not the case when I set my monitor profile to be 'sRGB Profile' (what comes with OS X). In the case of 'sRGB Profile', the shift is much less pronounced than when I am using my monitor profile, but it is definitely there. I verified that "sRGB with profile" is, in fact, embedded with sRGB IEC61966-2.1.
I have posted the screen captures to my account and have named them according to the display profile used in the capture.
The color shift in the monitor profile capture ('Dell 2001FP') is very obvious. Look at the color charts.
The color shift in the 'sRGB Profile' is much, much more subtle. Look at the left end of the thing above the shish kabob skewer (light saber?), specifically in the small black section. You can see more detail in the "sRGB with profile" image.
As for the 'sRGB IEC61966-2.1' image, I'm quite certain there is no shift at all.
http://jjc.smugmug.com/gallery/2456853
I'm not sure I understand this. As long as you are consistent with your profile usage, you will at least get consistent results within a browser, regardless of where anything is hosted. I am not a web designer, but is this difficult to manage?
I'm not sure I understand this either. As far as I can tell, the Save for Web preview shows what the image will look like if you were to strip the profile entirely. Assuming its default of not including a profile ('ICC Profile' unchecked), it will not make a difference whether or not Smugmug keeps the profile since the file itself will not have a profile (by default). In the case where the 'ICC Profile' is checked, then I understand, since it appears that the preview assumes that the profile will be stripped.
Are PNG profiles handled differently than JPG profiles? If not, I'm not sure what you mean.
Yes, GIFs have no color management.
Agreed, the performance penalty on thumbnails is pretty clearly not worth it.
I understand the sarcasm, but it's not fair to completely leave out the actual benefit, which is that Safari users will get to see pictures as they were intended by the creator.
I sincerely appreciate the amount of effort you guys have put into this issue. I'll throw my two cents in and say that keeping profiles would reduce the number of times I'll have to explain to all my Safari-using visitors why my photos look washed out ("Trust me, they look better than that!").
It occurred to me that you were talking about just sticking an sRGB profile on all images, regardless of what they originally had attached. If that's the case, I'm less confused about some of the statements you make above. I think we can agree that doing this is a bad idea.
However, I think that giving members the option of preserving their profiles in their non-thumbnail images is a happy compromise. By default, you can strip profiles, preserving the current behavior. But if I know what I'm doing and actually like the fact that Safari obeys color profiles, it would be terrific if I could keep the profile intact!
I think we can also agree that Safari should just assume sRGB for images without profiles. I can't imagine any scenario where it makes sense for it to assume no profile whatsoever and just let the user's local color environment wholly determine what gets seen. I've already requested this of Apple, but I doubt this is at the forefront of their concerns.
http://blogs.smugmug.com/onethumb/2007/02/14/this-is-your-mac-on-drugs/
I'd love it if you could digg it (register for digg if you haven't already -- it's a great, great site). We want this flag raised high on the Apple pole. I used to work for Steve and I think the fix is so simple and compelling, they will act if we digg this story.
Thanks!
Baldy
But does setting your gamma to 2.2 really solve ALL the problems? I've had my gamma set to 2.2 for years and years, but it seems it just reduces the problems. Sure, I agree that Apple should ship their systems at 2.2, but isn't there more to do?
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
Dugg!
In addition to the default gamma, what about having Safari assume sRGB [IEC61966-2.1] for images without profiles?
Apple's abuzz about it and I think we're on the right track: it's an OS-level issue first, and browser issue second.
They are tricky waters that Safari has waded into and we're getting emails from the Safari team. If you assume sRGB IEC blah blah for any image on the page, you have to assume it for all images, including logos, etc. Then if you don't correct the CSS, HTML and Flash (which they have no way of correcting currently) you're screwed because colors won't match. If the monitor profile is set to sRGB IEC blah blah, then color mismatches are gone.
The issue you're facing David, same for me, is you want to calibrate your monitor and not use a default profile, so Safari is gonna do it's thing and get small color mismatches because your calibration isn't gonna be 100% accurate.
I coulda said all that better, sorry, but I'm late for my help desk shift. Lemme know if you want me to write this more clearly...
After reading some of Dave Hyatt's postings, I now understand that Safari cannot do anything about Flash color, which I think is really the heart of the issue. If I understand correctly, Safari has the power to color correct and assume sRGB for everything else on the page.
Regardless, why not allow optional preservation of the profile on SmugMug? I'm not designing any webpages where elements have to match. I don't like setting my own monitor profile to sRGB IEC... where everything looks kind of blue (as suggested by the blog entry). I just have a lot of Mac-using friends that do not see what I intended.
How about this?
1. A user-specific setting that specifies whether profiles should be preserved.
2. The default will be that profiles will not be preserved, along with a recommendation and warning not to mess with it (maybe like the Auto vs. True color warning). It could also have a link to one or more of these blog entries about the issue.
3. If a user flags that she wants profiles to be preserved, they are preserved for all sizes but thumbnails.
I'm assuming a few things with this proposal. First, I'm assuming that the stripping of profiles happens near the upload and that it would be difficult and slow to handle it dynamically later on. For example, I am assuming that it would be difficult to have a checkbox that says "Use attached profile" after the photo has been uploaded and processed. I'm also assuming that you want to keep this away from the vast majority of people who do not care at all about this issue. I am assuming that it is easier to do this at the user level (w.r.t. UI) than at the gallery or photo level. Finally, I am assuming that what has already been stated about the performance implications of profiles on thumbnails still holds.
This gives no change in default behavior. I think it probably gives small changes to processing pipelines. But it makes me and others like me very happy
Again, I reiterate that I really appreciate the effort you guys have put into this.
Jeffrey Friedl asked them a reasonable question on their blog: why not have Safari react to a tag in the photo (like Photoshop does) instead of requiring a profile. If they did that, we wouldn't need the profile and it would work for thumbs too.
We hesitated to add profiles because we heard from them that they were going to do the correction, but as Dave Hyatt mentioned in our blog, they had to pull it back out because the bug reports kept streaming in.
So maybe until Apple does something else we can start adding the profiles to larger than thumbs.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/2/15/7073
Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
Actually Safari is about the only browser that's color managed. There are none on the Windows side.
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
First, to cut to the chase, here is a web page that displays properly across multiple browsers including Safari. The display will be identical in all those browsers provided your monitor profile uses gamma 2.2, however the specific monitor calibration you use doesn't matter (this is a good thing, obviously, since you have the freedom to calibrate your monitor):
http://thompson.chris.googlepages.com/safariisnotwonky
Sorry for borrowing Baldy's sample image. I hope he doesn't mind. If he does I'll take it down. The title is meant to be a tongue-in-cheek reaction to his sample page. Also note that one of the images *doesn't have* an embedded profile and still displays properly in Safari.
I have attached an AppleScript which takes an image with any embedded profile and munges it so that it will appear correctly across browsers. You can either run it or compile it as an application and then drop images onto it. Note that it alters the image data so make a copy of images before you use it.
This solves most color-related workflow problems for web publishing. For instance, normally, if you set up a calibrated monitor profile, edit a photo in Lightroom, then export to sRGB, you'll find that even when your monitor uses gamma 2.2, the custom caibration curves you edited for cause the image to look different (usually washed out) in non-color managed browsers like Camino or Firefox or on Windows. Just run my script on your images after exporting from Lightroom and you'll no longer have this problem. *And* they'll look right in a properly color managed browser like Safari as well.
I can explain more about how this works tomorrow if anyone is interested.
Having identical RGB values appear the same though your display isn't the issue or difficult. In fact Photoshop shows you this as well in its soft proof options. But multiple users have no guarantee that the same numbers will appear the same way without a ICC aware browser.
Does the preview in Photoshop look identical to all browsers (aside from say Safari which does behave correctly)? View the images at 100%.
There there's this:
http://www.color.org/version4html.html
In Safari, all four quadrants are identical. What about your browsers?
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
That's not what I was saying. Of course you can't make color fully consistent across multiple computers without color management. No one would seriously make that claim.
OK I want to be sure I understand you point.
You can of course make multiple users see the same color appearance if you use Safari. It treats the images like Photoshop.
If you want to make multiple browsers on your computer show the same preview (which I'm not sure how useful that is), then that's not difficult.
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/