Aka, why I hate modern web browser developers.

Color is important to most photographers. They spend a lot of time working on getting the color in their photos to ‘pop’ without going over the line of ‘too much photoshop’, or, even worse, the horrible Web 2.0 Flashy HDR Effects Madness. You know the kinds of photos I’m talking about – where there’s so much local contrast, dodging and burning that the photo isn’t even considered to be a photo anymore.

But I digress: the problem I’m currently facing I “fixed” in March of 2007, around the time I posted this picture. One of my friends commented on how washed out my photo looked – and he was using a PC. The problem was that I had been shooting all my photographs the AdobeRGB color space, and had been outputting the files with the same space. What I didn’t know was that everyone who didn’t use Safari as their web browser wasn’t seeing what I was seeing.

You see, most web browsers (apart from Safari) don’t care what color space an image is saved in. It assumes a rather limited profile called sRGB. There’s a lot of reasons people give for this, and they are all stupid. Modern computers have well enough processing power to handle this.

So – when I first came across this problem, I just told all the tools in my image workflow to output with sRGB, and I was in good hands again. However, I recently migrated my whole workflow to Apple’s Aperture program, with Photoshop for final image manipulation and output. Somewhere in the transition, my color profile settings got eaten. I’m not sure when or where. This means that most people who look at my photos are looking at them in a way that I didn’t intend. They are most likely seeing a muted, washed out version of what I’m trying to put together.

This was pointed out to me just under a week ago. I’ve since updated all my application settings, and I think that I’ve gotten it right – or at least close to right. A friend of mine has graciously offered loan me his color profiling device (a small camera that looks at the monitor and figures out what you should be seeing), so I can produce consistent results. I’m also going to have to remember to periodically check my work with FireFox, just to see if it’s horribly broken again.