Wolfie - Colour Managment investigation
 

Hi Harry

First step is to check out the Spyder calibration

Right mouse click on the desktop and select "Screen resolution" option.

Then Select "Advance settings"

Then Select "Color Management" Tab and then "Color Management" button

Check that only the ICC profile generated by Spyder calibration is available for the monitor device

Hi Rob There's only one profile listed, that being the Spyder profile.

Harry

Ive been following this discussion with interest. I've downloaded the two robin images, loaded them into photoshop and sampled a few spots. Like Rob, within the tolerances of error the samples are the same.

My thinking is that its a browser issue rather than a system issue - what browser are you using? Have you tried a different one?

This page http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter will show you how well your browser is reading ICC profiles.

In firefox you might need to enable colour management see this page http://ntown.at/2013/12/28/firefox-color-management/ I've found that IE11 does a better job that firefox 34 even with colour management enabled but I've not tried Chrome or Safari

Ok Harry

To confirm my theory that your machine's colour management is over saturating an image that does not have an embedded ICC profile I have constructed a simple web page that contains the same image with and without an ICC profile embedded. Saved in Photoshop with and without the ICC Profile box ticked.

http://robertstocker.co.uk/Harry/test.html

another area to investigate is the "Advanced Tab" on The color management window(you were looking at the device tab earlier).
Do you have say wide gamut or Prophoto selected.

Hi Clive That was my first thought but when I was looking for a Colour management setting in the firefox browser I could not see anything.

Following your link Clive these are my settings in firefox 34.0.5 below. I see my setting is the default of only manage if image has a profile tag. I have never had to enable or disable colour management in the browser but I know there was talk some time back about handling profile. Harry's issue seem to be when a file does not have a profile as in the case of WPF generated images. Maybe Ollie can enable the feature to embed a sRGB profile. It only makes the file 3Kb bigger.

Maybe Harry has somehow got an inappropriate profile set in this config

I've just had a little play with these setting and restarted firefox and I can't see it has made any difference to the images in question.

Needle in a haystack comes to mind in knowing the cause of the problem.

Rob you are correct the image without an ICC profile does look over saturated.

Following your comments to Clive and as I use Firefox I am now looking at the following site.
Sorry about the delay in reporting back, but I've had a long day at the health clinic with my daughter. Never seen so many people at the clinic and guess what, apart from the staff and my family just about everyone spoke a different language. Going to Boston Lincolnshire is like going to a foriegn country.

Harry

http://www.metalvortex.com/blog/2012/03/16/831.html

Harry

Rob
Issue now solved many thanks. Here is what I did based on info provided by you.

I went to metalvortex.com, here I followed the instructions and set the GFX-colour management from the default of 2 (Enable color management for tagged graphics only. (Default)) to 1 (Enable color management for rendered graphics)

Now my robin looks the same in both large and small versions.

I've learnt a lot about colour management over the past few days. Fingers crossed that my brain will be able to retain this knowledge. :)

Again many thanks for your help in solving this problem.

Harry

Yes you hear many languages spoken in my area too.

What I don't understand is why it appears to be applying colour management an object that does not have a colour management tag.

Maybe we are thinking about this the wrong way around.

It maybe with your monitor a non-colour managed object appears over-saturated and the colour is toned down on a managed object.

Try right clicking on my web page images to save them to your machine and view them in a picture viewer program rather than photoshop and see if the still look different. If they do that would rule out a browser issue.

Good that you have solved it. My firefox has been set to 2 by default. I was unaware of the hidden settings.

Got there in the end :D

Hi Rob/Harry

Looking at Rob's test image in firefox with it set to the default setting of 2 - I too see the image without the profile as over saturated when I view default them on my Eizo but on my laptop I cant see any difference. Resettiing it to the recommended 1 makes the images look the same.

Rob - you say you don't see any difference in your test image with colour management set to 2 - what screen are you using?

Incidently IE11 renders both images the same... but at the more saturated level, which I think confirms that IE doesn't support ICC profiles

I've just had a look with Chrome & that doesn't display Rob's un-tagged image correctly either...

This leads me to the thought that although we may be using firefox AND have it set up correctly, the vast majority of internet users will not. Therefore when ever the forum resizes an image and removes the tag, the vast majority of users will not see our images as we intended :(.

It therefore follows that we should upload images so that they are NOT resized. I'm not sure at what point that happens, but I know that with images max 1000px it doesn't but 1100px images are so maybe 1000px is the limit

Clive as you are using a top end monitor and saw the difference in Rob's test image, I assume that you were also able to see the difference in my robin photo.

In many cases the problem with oversturation I had was not so obvious on many photos, but occassionally as in the robin it looked very bad, this worried me a little due to the thought that everyone else was seeing this oversaturation.

It's extremely rare that I use IE, but I decided to check out the robin and what do I see, both versions look the same, oversaturated, so I guess anyone using IE will not see my photos as I intended them to be seen.

Could I suggest that everyone now uses only Firefox:):)

Harry

Hi Harry

As I have the firefox gfx.color_management.mode set to 1 both robins look the same. However if I switch back to the default 2, the resized one does look oversaturated.

Even if you could persuade everyone to use firefox, if they use the default settings the resized images will appear over saturated.

Chrome appears to handle the original image correctly, but the resized one is oversaturated.

IE ignores the ICC profiles & oversaturates both.

So my recommendation is that you upload images no bigger than 1000px so that the forum doesn't resize them. That way at least chrome & firefox users will see your images as you intended

On my Work PC running windows 7 with a cheap £100 1920 x 1080 monitor both the tagged and untagged look the same in Firefox, chrome, IE and Safari. I have the 4 major browsers on my machine to check the company website pages.

At home my old CRT monitor became so dim and would not calibrate correctly. My son managed to source an unloved Samsung Multisync 24" 1920 x 1200. It's got a dead pixel and a small mark on the screen but it's served me well for the last couple of years. Can't complain as it was a freebe.

In both cases I just plugged the screen in and let the plug and play do it's thing. Which makes me wonder did you install the driver disk that came with your monitors ?

The threshold for resizing is 1025px

The reason why most of my larger posts are 1024 px