flickr, color, and you

Update: FireFox 3.1 added color management support. Chrome doesn't have it yet. See this article (under Off-color Remarks section).

01.27.10

 

Update: This article on Utata that does a good job of explaining color spaces.

09.08.06

 

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I've been bit by the color management bug. I've always noticed that the color of my photos vary quite a bit during their journey from photoshop to flickr... colors that are rich & saturated will sometimes appear washed out, faded, or desaturated.

 

It turns out there's a few factors involved (for my specific set-up):

—I've been capturing and editing in the Adobe RGB (1998) color space

—No web browsers (except Safari) support color management at this point.**

Which basically means the browsers don't read the embedded color profile; they just automatically assume all images are in the sRGB color space (more about that later).

—I'm editing photos on a 20" G5 imac (now using MBP + cinema display), which, besides having a very bright, high-contrast LCD screen, has (up to now) been using the Apple ColorSync monitor profile, which uses a 1.8 gamma (produces lighter images, versus the PC 2.2 gamma standard, which is darker).

 

In an ideal world, all web browsers would offer color management support, all end-users of flickr would embed color profiles in their photos (or have their editing software do it by default), and no one would spill soda pop on the seats of the bus, right? But it ain't so. Firefox (or IE, Camino, Opera, etc) doesn't care if your photo is in the Adobe RGB color space, and doesn't care if it converts it properly to sRGB. So what's the big deal— what's so bad about sRGB? There isn't anything wrong with sRGB... it does its job fairly well, all things considered. But it does have some limitations— it's a profile that's basically an average of the all low-end CRTs from the mid-nineties, so its primary purpose is lowest-common denominator compatibility, not accurate color reproduction of a wide color gamut. So it has a much smaller color gamut than, say, Adobe RGB (1998). In other words, it displays less color, but insures broader compatibility. More about sRGB here on wikipedia.

 

So I've made some changes in my photo processing workflow to compensate. The workflow goes something like this:

1) RAW images captured in camera

2) RAW images imported into LightRoom, processed, and exported to Photoshop

3) Photoshop is set to embed Adobe RGB profile in all images

4) Final product is soft-proofed (Windows Gamma 2.2 sRGB) then converted to sRGB via a programmed action (but original is saved in Adobe RGB for printing purposes)

5) .jpg embedded with sRGB profile is uploaded to flickr

 

I'm sure I'll be tweaking things around over the next couple weeks as I learn more. But it's a start.

 

For more in-depth info, check out Real World Color Management (Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy, Fred Bunting).

 

(**= correction, pointed out by dcJohn: OmniWeb (for the Mac) also supports CM)

 

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Done