Firefox for windows! (Why photographers should be using it)

just testing on PC: maybe colour of my pics not quite as bright on Firefox as on Safari, but nowhere as pronounced an effect as on your test attachments Clive. Perhaps its the coftware conversion from no colour profile to sRGB that is the trouble, not conversion from Adobe RGB to s RGB?

[Gidders]

Originally Posted by Chris

I suspect that most people with visual awareness and certainly photographers will make up very large sections of the small percentages having better computers and decent screens.

That's a bold (and I suspect misleading) assumption but anyway its not about better computers & decent screens - it about which browser you use. Fact 86% of users are using Internet Explorer. Maybe the more savvy users are those using Firefox but even then - Fact only 11% of people are using Firefox & I suspect only a very very small proportion of them know about Duncan's tip. Therefore unless you post images that have been converted to sRGB they will not look how you intend to the majority of users.

Originally Posted by Chris

Although your attachments behave as you predict (on mac anyway, will wire up the mouldering PC and try that later), my own actual photos, saved with 'adobe RGB' do not. Firefox on mac is the only place where they look flat.

Of course your own pics look right on you Mac in Safari - it can read the icc profile, and I would expect them to look flat on Firefox on your Mac (unless you've applied Duncan's tip) - because Firefox as standard cant read the profile - thats the point

Originally Posted by Chris

On PC/XP my pics look normal & identical in Safari & Firefox.

I would expect them to look right on Safari on your PC as it will read the profile. I would not expect them to look the same in Firefox on the PC without the mod. There are a couple of possible explanations:

1. Have you calibrated the PC monitor with something like a Huey, or Spyder? If not it may not be accurately displaying the full range of tones
2. What sort of image are you using for the comparison? Highly saturated darker colours are more likely to show the difference. If the image is, say, a landsacpe with a fairly even tonal range the difference will be far less noticable.

Originally Posted by Chris

There is also the fact that on one's own computer, if you do not have all programmes set to use the same colour space, the same image will appear different according to in which prog a particular stage of editing is taking place.

Not true. If you are using programmes capable of reading icc profiles and working in different colours spaces, then the program will display the colours correctly on screen irrespective of the working colour space.

Try this. the attached test file is the one that I downloaded (its just been resized) in Colourmatch RGB space WITH an embedded icc profile. NB if you are using a browser that doest read profile it will appear more saturate than either of the two I posted yesterday. Download it and then open it in you editing programme with the programme working space set to , say Adobe RGB. In Photoshop you get a profile mismatch warning and the option to either use the embedded profile, or convert to the working space. Which ever you do, the image looks the same ON SCREEN. The change goes on behind the screens & Photoshop then interprets it and present the colours accurately.

Originally Posted by Chris

This is nothing to do with printing, where it is the printer colour profile that needs to be matched to printer and, ideally image.

We agree on this

Originally Posted by Chris

just testing on PC: maybe colour of my pics not quite as bright on Firefox as on Safari, but nowhere as pronounced an effect as on your test attachments Clive. Perhaps its the software conversion from no colour profile to sRGB that is the trouble, not conversion from Adobe RGB to s RGB?

I have not converted to "no colour profile" - one image is in Adobe RGB colour space, the other is in sRGB colour space. What I have done is just stripped out the icc profile that tells Photoshop, Safari etc which colour space is being used. Therefore they don't know - just like Internet Explorer or unmodified Firefox and the display the images "as is" so to speak

For more info on colour management, colour spaces & profiles I see Duncan has just started a thread <<<HERE>>>

I've got some links that I'll toddle over & add

[Gidders]

As a test, I've download a couple of your more saturated images from your gallery, and then opened them in Photoshop - WOW - the colours really pop, but when I viewed them in Firefox on the forum they just looked so so

I've taken the liberty of reposting them, minus icc profile which is how most users will see them, as you originally posed them in Adobe RGB, well technically Nikon Adobe RGB 4.0.0.3000, and then converted to sRGB so people can see them how you see them

Hope this helps but I strongly recommend everyone posts images converted to sRBG & then it doesn't matter what browser people view them with - they'll look great

This has got a bit complicated!
All on mac:
With your last edition of 'digital dog' image, I can get 5 diferent renderings of which only 2 are the same viz downloaded and viewed in Capture NX and PSE4, all others including it on Safari are pretty desaturated in comparison and well to the blue on the lady's jumper
With your editions of mine, even viewed on Safari the better (RH) one is still not as good as the original viewed on Safari, which in turn is identical to it viewed in NX, PSE or GraphicConverter, my mac equivalent of Bridge, Lightroom or whatever.
On PC:
I used the Poppy as one of the tests and, in Firefox 2 without add-on, had to look quite hard to notice the difference from it as viewed on Safari. It is a cheap 17" flat screen with absolutely no calibration or anything, wouldn't have the faintest idea how to on XP.

I think I am going to stick to posting with the Adobe/Nikon RGB and hope everyone on WPF at least takes Duncan's advice and either use Safari or adds the Add-on to their Firefox 3. I imagine most pbase subscribers will also be that savvy.

I don't think WPF postings are accessible through search engines. If people searching from their ****ty office PC with IE look in following a search, they will have to get what they do; at least if they swipe it, it will look OK in PSE . I despair of office attitudes to computers; one of my last placements was in an office where they gave you 2 x 17" screens, being cheaper than 1 x 21", in another I refused to use their monitor as it was so far out of XY alignment (for CAD work); at publishers where my daughter works they are still using mac OS9 (pre 2000)

[dfahr1]

Just to see if Clive's comparison is fair, I saved Chris's poppy image off the web, then opened it in CS3 and then saved the image in the two color spaces.

I have both IE and Firefox on my PC and do see a big difference between the two images. The AdobeRGB color space is definitely flat in comparison. As far as I tell, my sRGB copy is very close to Clive's.

[Gidders]

Originally Posted by Chris

This has got a bit complicated!

Its not complicated - THE WEB STANDARD IS sRGB
Don't take my word for it - Google it, have a look at these references, what ever

http://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB.html

http://www.color.org/sRGB.xalter

http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/color_spaces.htm - see towards the bottom of the page

http://www.pantone.de/Pages/Pantone/...?pg=19456&ca=2

http://pan.tristimulus.co.uk:8200/kb...-24.9935742969 see number 3

I could go on - there are loads of them

At the end of the day, if you are happy with (I suspect) the majority of people viewing
your images thinking that they are flat and washed out - post in Adobe RGB - otherwise
I strongly recommend that everyone should convert to sRGB before posting.... but everyone
has to make their own choice.

Originally Posted by Gidders

Its not complicated - THE WEB STANDARD IS sRGB
Don't take my word for it - Google it, have a look at these references, what ever

If you want to live in a world run by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard and their likes Clive, that is your choice. I say thank heavens there have always been minority enthusiasts with the imagination, skills and determination not to be bullied or wiped out by them.

The camera manufacturers make the camera capable of capturing the widest available range of colour that technology allows, roughly 'Adobe RGB'. As photography enthusiasts we can edit what the camera brings home to optimise our personal use of it.

Why then dumb it down a bit when all that is necessary for viewers to do is download, free, either Safari or Firefox 3 and a few add-ons to use for viewing photos. This in no way forces them to use these browsers for anything else. I only use Safari for this purpose, for most others I regard it as both inferior and a trouble-causer.

Eventually other browsers will come to regard faithfulness to colour profiles as essential, just as Microsoft, after nearly a decade of evasion and obstruction (during which Apple, Commodore and Atari pioneered it), came round to intelligent use of Graphic User Interface.

[Don Hoey]

And there I was trying to sort out a cheap high speed flash trigger for Lello's, thread then along came this. Subtle ploy by Duncan & Clive to slow me down .

Browser wise I am using Opera on a pc, and going back to Clives post #7 then the differences in Opera are very obvious. Take the one from post #12 then that is even more vibrant than sRGB from post #7.

So how does anyone see my images. I have done a screen grab of my last gallery pic in NX and CS. So I have two different things - Colour Profile and Colour Mode.

Basic editing of a raw is done and saved as 16 bit Tiff in Colour Profile : Nikon sRGB 4.0.0.3001 in NX.
In CS I then spot, resize, sharpen and change bit depth from 16bit to 8bit before saving for posting.
When viewed from the forum gallery in Opera they look fine so I assumed all OK but may now well be wrong as far as others go.

So if I'm doing something wrong please say. Bit of a numpty here, so all advice greatfully taken on board. eg how colour profile is stripped out if that is necessary.

Don

Originally Posted by Don Hoey

So if I'm doing something wrong please say. Bit of a numpty here, so all advice greatfully taken on board. eg how colour profile is stripped out if that is necessary.

Don

I don't think it is a matter of right or wrong. Stephen in a parallel post first pointed out that Safari had a built-in facility for picking up the colour profile of an image; Duncan starting this thread added that Firefox 3 with addon 6891 does likewise.

If you care to download one of these and use it for viewing this or similar galleries, you will get the picture with 100% of the colour that the poster intended.

For your own pics, not sure what 'spot' is, but the rest can all be done within NX and you only end up with (a) the NEF file as edited (b) a web version .jpg, say 1024 max width and/or 768 max ht and use the quality percentage in edit>size/resolution to keep file size below 300kb.

If spot is de-spot, ie remove odd blemish, that can usually also be done using NX1.3 appropriate brush selection and pipetting adjacent colour (sometimes with linked enhancement adding some grain or noise to blend). In NX 2 there is a 'healing brush' tool and more keyboard short-cuts.

[yelvertoft]

As Chris says, if you apply colour management to your browser, it allows you to see the range of colours contained within any profiles embedded in the image. This is ONLY true if the monitor you are using is capable of displaying the range of colours presented. This is where Clive is coming from, as most monitors can only display a small sub-set of the colours capable of being captured, the sRGB standard was developed to squeeze the full range down to a range that could be viewed consistently on most monitors.

Given these limitations, I see no reason not to enable colour management within Firefox as you aren't losing anything if the colour space of the image being viewed is set to sRGB anyway. As Clive says, this is the standard for web images and the space that should be used if preparing images for web use.