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

Originally Posted by Gidders

Chris - not sure what profile that you are saving your pics with - if it is Adobe RGB then these would look flat in a non colour managed environment. I suspect that the "gaudy & orrible pics" are more to do with an improperly calibrated monitor

Apple RGB, which I think is virtually identical to Adobe RGB

Just can't wait to calibrate a monitor under XP but you could be right Clive, tho then why would it be OK in Safari?

Originally Posted by Gidders

As I understand it monitors can not display the whole of the sRBG colour space - LCD/TFT ones more so that CRT, and therefore the greater gamut of the Adobe RGB colour space is wasted when you view on screen - the benefit comes when you produce hard copy.

I don't think you are right on this Clive, but will ask Robert to glance at this thread.

My understanding is that all RGB is about display on a monitor, the Adobe and Apple versions including a slightly larger colour range than sRGB. Apple have always included best available resolution, colour etc as standard; hopefully PCs have now caught up. If one is going to share something on-line, I like to share the best available: keeping the enhanced RGB colour and using scaling and save quality rather than 'save for web'

For printing the image has to be converted to CMYK colour. I have found printing directly from the edited RAW file from within DPP and disabling Epson colour management is producing better prints than I have ever had. This also means one can fine tune the RAW edit doing small actual prints which has no effect whatsoever on .jpg s extracted for gallery posting.

Back to PC and Safari - the only monitor calibration I could find was a 2 frame process that seemed to have no noticable effect instead of the 10 or so stage process on the mac (and Cambridgein colour.com used to have, though Sean now seems to have given up http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/viewing.htm)

Putting my mac with original and Safari next to the PC, on the latter I find Safari correct and Firefox way out.

I am not however going to recommend Safari for any purpose other than viewing gallery pics. Re-trying it for a few days, I find it has a lot of very bad habits eg poor bookmarks, dragging progs like acrobat within Safari frame instead of as set in the proper job, no way of stopping animations, gno szpelinge czeczer and INSUFFERABLE ,won't remember my WPF log in.

[robski]

It would be interesting to know if Safari supplies it own colour management engine such as CMM to deal with the ICC profiles or uses Windows OS colour management ICM or maybe it supplies the Mac Colorsync engine.

Anyway I've have extracted some relevant parts from an Adobe technical document you may find interesting on colour spaces.

sRGB

Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft designed sRGB as a standardized RGB space for consumer-level
digital cameras, scanners, and printers. The goal was that users of these devices wouldn’t require
any color management knowledge to produce acceptable results. Such devices would assume the
color space is sRGB, making the reproduction process within applications that didn’t use color
management simple.

sRGB is derived from HDTV standards, so nearly all CRT and LCD displays can reasonably
produce sRGB if properly calibrated. Even uncalibrated, such devices often produce adequate
color from images in sRGB.

Since few web browsers are ICC aware, sRGB is currently an ideal color space for images destined
for the Internet. Of all the RGB working spaces installed with Adobe applications, sRGB has the
smallest gamut. The gamma encoding is 2.2. However, sRGB’s gamut is a limitation for more
demanding output, such as a printing press or many of the ink jet and photo printers so commonly
used today.

Apple RGB

Apple RGB is a legacy working space based on the original Apple 13" Trinitron monitor. The
gamut isn’t much larger than sRGB and the gamma encoding is 1.8. Early users of Macintosh®
computers working with products such as Photoshop and Adobe® Illustrator® used Apple RGB
as their working space prior to the introduction of additional working spaces in these products.
Unless you need to work with documents created from very old versions of Photoshop (4.0 or
earlier), there is little reason to consider Apple RGB.

Adobe RGB (1998)

This working space has a significantly larger gamut than any of the working spaces discussed so
far. Adobe RGB (1998) uses 2.2 gamma encoding. This working space is much better for those
who will output their files to a printing press, since the gamut allows all colors in Specifications
for Web Offset Publications (SWOP) CMYK to be fully contained. One issue with a gamut this
large is it is larger than the gamut of nearly all displays. Saturated colors that may exist in Adobe
RGB (1998) could be outside the display gamut and thus not visible. You might be editing colors
you can’t see. This fact is true of all working spaces that exceed a display gamut. Note that a few
high-end displays providing an extended gamut matching Adobe RGB are now available, but at
a very high price. Unless you know you have such a display, you are probably working within
the gamut restrictions of sRGB when viewing your images. The advantages and disadvantages of
wide gamut spaces are below in more detail.


Limitations of working spaces

As discussed, the gamut of a working space in comparison with the gamut of your display should
be considered. However, just because a working space gamut exceeds the display gamut doesn’t
mean a color document will exceed the gamut of either. Images have a color gamut as well. You
might photograph a scene of very pastel colors such as a white dog on snow. You could encode
that image into ProPhoto RGB, but a huge portion of that working space gamut isn’t used. The
scene gamut might fit better in Adobe RGB (1998) or even sRGB. You need to be aware of the
working space gamut, the scene gamut, as well as the gamut of any output device you may use.
When you work with 24-bit images, all color and tone is defined in three 8-bit color channels. When
you work with wide gamut working spaces, the same bits need to be spread farther apart over the
entire color space. Consider this spreading of a finite number of bits as follows: Imagine you have
a half-inflated balloon that has 16.7 million dots evenly spaced over its surface. Now you blow
up the balloon to twice its original size. Each dot is spread farther apart. When you work with
8-bit-per-channel files, you create this effect when you encode the bits into a progressively larger
gamut working spaces. In such situations, it is possible that editing images will produce banding
(aliasing). For this reason, should you decide to use a wide gamut working space—for example,
something wider than Adobe RGB (1998)—you should attempt to encode the data in 16-bit color.
Many capture devices produce more than 8-bits per color and allow you to retain this extra data
to use in Photoshop. While the file size will be twice as big and image processing will take longer,
you can’t be too careful with your data. You may also wish to use 16-bit data with smaller gamut
color spaces.

[yelvertoft]

Chris,

I was a bit surprised to read your comment of "even better in safari" on my original plums picture
http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...2990&ppuser=34

I'm a bit surprised by your comment as the image had been put into the sRGB clour space when output from Phase One C1, the raw processor of choice for me. I didn't do anything to the original picture in Photoshop apart from resize and apply a little bit (about 30%) of sharpening. As far as I was aware, I have the output from Photoshop set to output in sRGB, so even if you are using a browser with colour management, as safari has, the picture should still only have its content limited to sRGB. Not knowing which browser viewers are going to be using when they view my pictures, I thought it made sense to produce output limited to sRGB as this would map most accurately onto the screens/viewing applications used by the majority of people looking at web based output.

Are you seeing a marked difference on the same computer when viewed using different browsers?

Regards,

Duncan

Originally Posted by yelvertoft

Chris,

I was a bit surprised to read your comment of "even better in safari" on my original plums picture
http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...2990&ppuser=34

I'm a bit surprised by your comment as the image had been put into the sRGB clour space .....Are you seeing a marked difference on the same computer when viewed using different browsers?

Regards,

Duncan

This applies on my Powermac G4, Safari is giving me the images as seen in editing programs, whereas Firefox gives a visibly faded version. On the PC waiting in a corner for Susan to become a compufreak there is no difference between Firefox and Safari, both as Safari on the mac. Maybe the mac version of Firefox is a bit behind as it tends to be....

Tho the more I try to understand this, the more confused and frustrated I get. I did do a screen calibration with inceased gamma and it does seem that that controls what one sees much more than the colour space and is totally a personal choice.

The other dimension is trying to get screen versions as near as possible to print versions for when I start going to local camera club. In this case the important bit is getting the DPP print preview (and for once you do get what you see) and edit window in synch & that is now quite good.


Probably need to spend a few grand on a coreduo Powerbook, 40D, CS3, new printer and a few lenses, but meanwhile will muddle along with what I have

[sassan]

I guess Job could do a great favor to everyone by either let window to create a new version of IE or make the reverse of what is offered here
(Oh no another Mac PC discussion?!)

[blackmarlin]

Just downloaded Safari, tried it and I think it's a countrymile ahead of Firefox,
Opens quickly and will let me mess about more than Firefox even though we are stuck with a link to AOL that stops me using Firefox properly.

Alan

[srf4real]

I process in adobe rgb in case one of my recipients wants to print their own copy... I use Safari because it beats firefox or opera even on my mac! Sometimes I get comments from other online viewers that my pic looks washed out... it's usually their browser. ; )

[sassan]

Originally Posted by srf4real

I get comments from other online viewers that my pic looks washed out... it's usually their browser. ; )

Or more likely their monitors and who it is calibrated or rather not calibrated.