washed out pics in flickr/firefox -sRGB?

fontmoss

fontmoss

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Name
Dave
Edit My Images
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ok i know the way my images differ in safari and firefox is due to the way the sRGB is set up but i dont know how to alter this? essentially pics full of colour on safari look washed out or dull in firefox (which is the browser i almost always use) help please!
 
Do you means your own images or other peoples?
 
my own images, they look dull and faded when i look at them in firefox but on the same computer in safari they look much brighter
 
The reason is Firefox is not a colour managed browser. Well, that's not entirely true, it is, but it's not enabled by default. Safari is a colour managed browser hence why the same images look different in the two.

There is a way to enable colour management in Firefox though. There is a plugin that will let you enable and disable it through the Firefox preferences...

Firefox 3.1 will have it enabled by default.

Hope this helps.
 
By the sounds of it you're using AdobeRGB in your images not sRGB. Are you shooting raw or jpeg? If raw what app are you using to convert the images?
 
KayJay said:
There is a way to enable colour management in Firefox though. There is a plugin that will let you enable and disable it through the Firefox preferences...

Firefox 3.1 will have it enabled by default.
Click to expand...
Seriously? Oh gawd...
 
Now you're just teasing us. I'd have put you down as being firmly in the 'not a very good idea' camp.

I don't see the point in having colour management 'on' by default when a stupidly large percentage of the monitors in use today won't even be able to display the colours, let alone be calibrated so that whatever they can display is correct. And then there's all those people who might be viewing the images but using a browser that can't support Adobe RGB, or people assigning the wrong profiles in the first place, and so on and so forth.

By all means have it as an option. Just don't bloody have it on by default!
 
pxl8 said:
What's wrong with a browser supporting colour management by default? That's a *good thing*, surely?
Click to expand...

No I agree, I just worded it wrongly in my reply.

glitch said:
Now you're just teasing us. I'd have put you down as being firmly in the 'not a very good idea' camp.

I don't see the point in having colour management 'on' by default when a stupidly large percentage of the monitors in use today won't even be able to display the colours, let alone be calibrated so that whatever they can display is correct. And then there's all those people who might be viewing the images but using a browser that can't support Adobe RGB, or people assigning the wrong profiles in the first place, and so on and so forth.

By all means have it as an option. Just don't bloody have it on by default!
Click to expand...

Personally I think it should be on because that way the image is being shown correctly. You want images shown correctly don't you? It's on by default in Safari. But you can turn it off. It's just a preference.
 
glitch said:
Now you're just teasing us. I'd have put you down as being firmly in the 'not a very good idea' camp.

I don't see the point in having colour management 'on' by default when a stupidly large percentage of the monitors in use today won't even be able to display the colours, let alone be calibrated so that whatever they can display is correct. And then there's all those people who might be viewing the images but using a browser that can't support Adobe RGB, or people assigning the wrong profiles in the first place, and so on and so forth.

By all means have it as an option. Just don't bloody have it on by default!
Click to expand...

It's not a case of the browser being able to support AdobeRGB, it's just a profile.

Say someone posts an image in AdobeRGB, without colour management the browser will show the wrong colours. Currently the solution is to change the image to sRGB. By having a colour managed browser that would just happen automatically - that's a good thing.

If someone without a calibrated display is viewing the image then it would look the same in a colour managed browser using AdobeRGB as it would in a non-managed browser using sRGB - both might be wrong (in the sense that the display isn't calibrated) but they would at least look the same.
 
oh god i can see a lot of reading ahead of me!

well i guess my girlfriend (and camera) are away all weekend.

if anyone can direct me towards some reading for this itd be appreciated
 
cheers, used the colour management but firefox was already set up. damn

shooting in raw and just using iphoto to convert but the images in safari seem fine
 
What OS are you using? Can you post a link to one of the images?
 
yeah, it was already set to 'true' but having looked at safari the image seems consistent which it wasn't before. thanks very much this has been bugging me for a while!
 
It will have been off prior to installing the plugin, because once the plugin installs it sets it to on automatically ;)
 
pxl8 said:
Say someone posts an image in AdobeRGB, without colour management the browser will show the wrong colours. Currently the solution is to change the image to sRGB. By having a colour managed browser that would just happen automatically - that's a good thing.
Click to expand...
I don't think it's the worst possible thing that could have happened, and I agree with the other points raised in your post, but given that the market share for all the browsers is still heavily weighted in the favour of IE (67.40%) I just wonder how many of those users will be running a version of IE that does support Adobe RGB. Assuming either IE7 or IE8 does or will.

And it's the same with Firefox users. They've got a 21.63% market share, but just how many of those users will be upgrading to the latest version? Okay, Firefox automatically updates by default, but I'd wager a fair few people are still running v2 and haven't yet updated or even switch the auto update off and are running older versions out of choice.
 
glitch said:
I don't think it's the worst possible thing that could have happened, and I agree with the other points raised in your post, but given that the market share for all the browsers is still heavily weighted in the favour of IE (67.40%) I just wonder how many of those users will be running a version of IE that does support Adobe RGB. Assuming either IE7 or IE8 does or will.

And it's the same with Firefox users. They've got a 21.63% market share, but just how many of those users will be upgrading to the latest version? Okay, Firefox automatically updates by default, but I'd wager a fair few people are still running v2 and haven't yet updated or even switch the auto update off and are running older versions out of choice.
Click to expand...

You're forgetting one incredibly important thing. Browser percentages fluctuate depending on the type of website you're running. Creative websites like photography or art tend to recieve a greater number of hits from people running Firefox and Safari. Technical focused websites have a great number of visitors using IE.

On my personal website I've got 57.49% Firefox and 21.55% IE as of yesterday. 12.24% Safari, 5.19% using Chrome and 2.24% Opera followed by several minor browsing platforms including some hits from PlayStation machines.

On my music forums I've got 45.91% Firefox, 42.18% IE, 6.11% Safari and Opera at 2.23% followed by the rest.

Google analytic is amazing, and dispels a lot of myths.
 
There's a long way to go yet with colour management. Getting browser support is one step, getting full support in the OS for everything, including the normal GUI is where we want to be but that's years away. Ideally it would be tied in with some kind of feedback from the monitor to the OS so that when the user changes brightness, etc. the OS can adjust the profile on the fly which would work well enough for most users and proper calibration for the rest of us.

Until that happens the trend for wide gamut monitors is a mixed blessing as the UI can look truly awful on one of those :eek:

As for browser percentages, I average about 80% IE on my site but as I'm sRGB it's not a problem.
 
KayJay said:
You're forgetting one incredibly important thing. Browser percentages fluctuate depending on the type of website you're running. Creative websites like photography or art tend to recieve a greater number of hits from people running Firefox and Safari. Technical focused websites have a great number of visitors using IE.
Click to expand...
You're forgetting one incredibly important thing. The overwhelmingly large majority of people who make the sRGB/Adobe RGB cock-up are amateur photographers. Amateur photographers who are trying to show off their work, either to a wider audience for the acclaim or, more likely, to potential customers. Potential customers who aren't likely to be creatives.

By and large, creatives don't buy from other creatives; photographers don't buy work from other photographers, musicians don't buy music from other musicians. People who are trying to turn their hobby into something they can use to make money from won't be selling to other people doing the same hobby.

You sell to the general public who are willing to pay money for something they might not even have the faintest idea how to reproduce. They just like it enough to hand over their cash. And they are going to be the type of people who will probably be running a browser that can only 'see' sRGB. Sure, other photographers might be running a browser that can see the Adobe RGB profile, but who cares about them?

I could set up some sort of website that would enable people to buy prints directly off it and market that around one of the companies I used to work for. That would be somewhere in the region of 18 sites across the country and around 10,000 potential customers inboxes I could get into.

And assuming it was being viewed at work, on their work PC, around 90% of those people wouldn't be running a browser that supported Adobe RGB.

Whoops...

KayJay said:
On my personal website I've got 57.49% Firefox and 21.55% IE as of yesterday. 12.24% Safari, 5.19% using Chrome and 2.24% Opera followed by several minor browsing platforms including some hits from PlayStation machines.
Click to expand...
It doesn't matter how many of each type your site is getting, the fact remains that whatever percentages are visiting still come out of the overall market share percentages. And the overall market share of all internet browsers is heavily weighted towards a browser that cannot display Adobe RGB.

That's one hell of a lot of potential customers who you're just dismissing.
 
Of course you're forgetting that people shouldn't be using AdobeRGB online anyway, they should be providing images in the right format for their customers to view online.
 
I'm not dismissing anyone. When did I even imply that? I just called you on your statistics thing. It's all great throwing up stats but if you're using them incorrectly then they don't really mean a thing. You develop for the target audience. Simple as that. And if that includes using correct image profiles then so be it. I'm not denying that fact.
 
pxl8 said:
Of course you're forgetting that people shouldn't be using AdobeRGB online anyway, they should be providing images in the right format for their customers to view online.
Click to expand...
And that's my whole point.

As an example, if our OP was using Firefox 3.1 as his secondary browser, he'd never have known about the issues with Adobe RGB images looking 'washed out' on browsers that don't natively support it. Browsers that the overwhelmingly large majority of his target audience, assuming the site is directed at the general public, will probably be running.

Okay, that's taking a leap to the site being a portfolio website through which he intends to sell his work/services, but the point remains. Until we get to a situation where all browsers natively support Adobe RGB, having one with as large a market share as Firefox going native can only be asking for trouble, especially given the amount of times the sRGB/Adobe RGB question gets asked.

And yes, this site only attracts a very small percentage of photographers and an even smaller percentage of those people either get it wrong or realise they've done something wrong and ask why. Think of all the others who might be using Firefox, start using v3.1 and never realise.

KayJay said:
I'm not dismissing anyone. When did I even imply that? I just called you on your statistics thing. It's all great throwing up stats but if you're using them incorrectly then they don't really mean a thing.
Click to expand...
You are the one who is using them incorrectly and using your own personal statistics, so I'm saying you are dismissing people. With the greatest of respect and admiration for your sites and the work you've put in you're not the issue here. You understand enough about it for the sRGB/Adobe RGB issue to never even become an issue.

You are knowledgeable enough to realise your target audience, think about the connotations and design a site around that. Hell, I bet you're even smart enough to figure out a way of creating a site where it analyses the browser in use and displays images with the appropriate profile.

KayJay said:
You develop for the target audience. Simple as that. And if that includes using correct image profiles then so be it. I'm not denying that fact.
Click to expand...
The fact is that the target audience for any website is is the overall browser usage statistics, irrespective of who you're actually aiming it at or the people actually coming to you site. You brought that into the equation. It is, for the purposes of this conversation, irrelevant, as it's your site and your site statistics.

My point was, and still remains, that native support for Adobe RGB in browsers with as large a market share as Firefox is a bad move for people like our OP and thousands of others across the world.

People simply aren't going to realise what mistake they might be making when uploading images to their websites with the Adobe RGB profile in. I applaud the option being there, but it should be kept as an option, not switched on by default. It's still not time for that.
 
glitch said:
And that's my whole point.

As an example, if our OP was using Firefox 3.1 as his secondary browser, he'd never have known about the issues with Adobe RGB images looking 'washed out' on browsers that don't natively support it. Browsers that the overwhelmingly large majority of his target audience, assuming the site is directed at the general public, will probably be running.
Click to expand...

So you're saying browsers shouldn't support profiles because that's the only way people will learn to use the right profile?

On the other hand if IE (or even better, the OS) did have proper profile support then it wouldn't matter if the OP had used AdobeRGB, the browser would have properly managed the colours for the "general" audience. Browser support is the way forward because it takes the problem away for the vast majority who don't want or need to know about colour management, they just want to view the pictures.

Then only the people who care would need to consider which profile they should be used (y)
 
pxl8 said:
So you're saying browsers shouldn't support profiles because that's the only way people will learn to use the right profile?
Click to expand...
No, I'm saying until they all do, having the odd few that feature native support for Adobe RGB will just cause further confusion.
 
I used my own stats as an example of how audience varies relating to site content. Nothing else. But I do understand the point your making.
 
Oh I wasn't having a go at you, KayJay, just trying to use them to make a point. What you said was actually very interesting as I bet there's a lot of people out there who ought to be using Google Analytics that aren't.

In fact I'd love to know the stats for TP itself. They'd make for very interesting reading.
 
No, I'm saying until they all do, having the odd few that feature native support for Adobe RGB will just cause further confusion.
Click to expand...

Mind if I leave organising that to you? :LOL:
 
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