Monthly Archives: September 2010

Off-color remarks
Here’s what’s keeping me an active Firefox user, though: Chrome’s lack of support for color profiles.

Most images on the Web are encoded with a color scheme called sRGB, but there are others out there including AdobeRGB and Microsoft’s scRGB that can show a much broader range of colors. I’m a photography buff with an eensy-weensy photo business, so I prefer images to look as good as possible on the Web.

Apple’s Safari was the pioneer for color management, and Firefox added color profile support with version 3.0 if users manually enable it. With version 3.1, Firefox applies color profiles for images that have been tagged with one. As a result, images on my high-gamut monitor at home look fine in Firefox, but in Chrome they’re hideously garish and oversaturated. It’s a showstopper for me when I’m doing anything photo-related on the Web.

I recognize my color preference is at odds with Google’s performance push. Mozilla programmers found that supporting color profiles slowed Firefox 20 percent to 30 percent, though they reduced that number 4 percent to 5 percent with testing. Eventually, to get it lower, they went with a third way, applying color profiles only for tagged images, which caused only a 1 percent performance hit.

But Google hasn’t even gotten to the stage of evaluating performance effects. “I don’t see how any sites could depend on this feature if it’s missing/disabled for 90 percent of users,” said Chrome Program Manager Mark Larson in a response to a request to add color management to Chrome, referring to the fact that color management is missing in Internet Explorer and not enabled yet in mainstream Firefox. “I’m all for it, but it’s definitely not a release priority.”

Here is a screenshot of my latest picture for daily shoot shown in safari and chrome. The assignment was earth tones. When viewed in Chrome, the photo is a red and over saturated. Not quite as earth toney as I intended. These are the kind of details that make me want to stay with safari. It is also why I might just stick with black and white for my web photography. Beyond that, what am I supposed to do? Stick with print-only? iPad only? Oh well, colors are a pain in the butt anyway. And yes, the screenshot below will look different based on what browser you view it in, but you can at least see a difference. 

update: 

After restarting Chrome, the image looks the same now. Not sure what is happening. Not only does the image in flickr look okay, but the image on my desktop (which previously was over saturated when viewed in chrome) now looks fine in chrome. Guess it was a temporary glitch in my chrome?