Re: Color management in web browsers
Re: Color management in web browsers
- Subject: Re: Color management in web browsers
- From: MARK SEGAL <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 01 May 2011 19:48:00 -0700 (PDT)
Tom,
Well, here's what you said:
"I do not believe, personally, that General Color Management should be part
of the world wide web. Color management addresses a very small (but vocal)
population of users."
and,
"Now, onto the subject of wide gamut displays: the numbers are miniscule, and
there has not been a strong demand."
and
"Before we whine about the lack of color management on the web or handheld
devices, we need to consider the market need and demand. The fact is, that
color management does not normally make the image look "better" to most
people. Absent that demand, you will not see any work in this area, from the
major industry players."
But now you are saying it's an issue about colour management never being part of
the web specification? OK, maybe that's part of the problem and maybe it has the
same etiology you mentioned above, and for all of those reasons the current
situation nonetheless remains unacceptable to all those photographers concerned
about the proper rendition of their photographs on the internet; so the
questions are (a) whether the problem exists, and (b) whether there are
practical technical solutions.
You seem to be rejecting question (a) by telling me that what I see makes no
sense. Fine, whether it makes sense to you or not, I know what I see. And I know
other people with considerable expertise in this area also know there is a
problem. As well, is it not the case that there should be rendering from the
embedded profile in the image or absent that, an assumed profile (sRGB)
assigned by the browser for untagged elements, and then rendered to the display
profile by the OS?
To answer your question, you can try this yourself. Take some raw images with
people in them, so you have flesh tones to work with. Use a properly
colour-managed display. Do the appropriate tone and colour adjustments in
Lightroom, in the Develop Module. Select those images and click on the Web
Module. Generate a web gallery first in HTML format, and then in Flash format,
and upload them to your webspace. Now open those galleries from your webspace on
the same display in Firefox, then in IE and then in Safari, compare the flesh
tones with what you created in Lightroom and between the browsers, and you will
likely see what I mean. The other way of doing this, without up-loading the
images to the internet, is to use the Web Preview function in Lightroom, but for
each browser you will need to change your default browser to the one you want
Lightroom to open. To satisfy yourself about whether or not Lightroom may be
part of the problem, do all the web prep in Photoshop making sure to convert
the images to JPEG, sRGB with BPC selected, upload the images to your webspace
and make the same comparisons; you should see the same outcomes as for
Lightroom.
I'm looking forward to hearing back about your tests.
Mark
________________________________
From: Tom Lianza <email@hidden>
To: MARK SEGAL <email@hidden>; edmund ronald <email@hidden>
Cc: ColorSync Users Mailing List <email@hidden>
Sent: Sun, May 1, 2011 8:43:20 PM
Subject: Re: Color management in web browsers
Re: Color management in web browsers Hi Mark
“What I reject in principle is your apparent view that because a small segment
of the market is affected by these issues their concerns can be set aside. “
Mark, that is not the reason the problem is not addressed. It was NEVER part of
the Web specification, that is the reason it is not addressed.
My own feeling is that color management “on the web” will not be handled by a
browser, but by a web application. There are solutions to this, but they won’t
be free.
“I create in a Lightroom gallery and how those galleries look in a web-browser
at least on the same colour-managed display (I know they won't look the same on
someone else' non-managed display, but that isn't the industry's problem, it is
the users'.). I get that in Safari, but not in Firefox and IE.”
This makes absolutely no sense. Browsers are supposed to display pixel for pixel
color, there should be no “rendering”. If images are converted to sRGB they
should all appear alike on each browser. Color management has nothing to do
with this. I noted that Google chrome uses Quicktime to preview a tif file in a
browser window. There, all bets are off. How does quicktime manage color? It
certainly has nothing to do with the browser because Chrome is not color
managed.
Try running the HTML test on the ICC web site: www.color.org on the right hand
side of the page, there is a link that says “is your system version 4 ready”
Load the HTML page into each browser and check the result. That will tell you
if the browser respects profiles in HTML. You can run the same test for PDF.
Please tell me how you link to a Lightroom gallery in a web browser. I would
like to test this path with some tools that I have.
Regards,
Tom
On 5/1/11 11:55 AM, "MARK SEGAL" <email@hidden> wrote:
Tom,
>
>What I reject in principle is your apparent view that because a small segment of
>the market is affected by these issues their concerns can be set aside.
>
>
>You are in the colour management business. That business caters to the people
>who want colour management, not to whatever percentage of the world doesn't even
>know what the term means. By definition your market is a small microcosm of all
>the people who look at screens of whatever type. So if that's your market,
>that's who you need to satisfy.
>
>By "you" I don't mean you personally - I mean the colour management industry as
>a whole, and the committees who advise it.
>
>
>My display is VERY well colour-managed. Maybe that's the problem - it allows me
>to see what's really going on. I do not post ARGB(98) images on a web browser.
>I'm talking sRGB.
>
>
>To be clear, what I mean by "standards" is that I want reasonable consistency
>between the colours I create in a Lightroom gallery and how those galleries look
>in a web-browser at least on the same colour-managed display (I know they won't
>look the same on someone else' non-managed display, but that isn't the
>industry's problem, it is the users'.). I get that in Safari, but not in Firefox
>and IE. So you are telling me the problem is my display and not the browsers?
>How could that be if my display is well-managed, the galleries are created
>"web-correct" in sRGB, and they look fine in one browser but not two others? Is
>it possible that these browsers are not standards-compliant in terms of how they
>render colour? And have you looked into why it can happen that galleries created
>with Adobe Flash are even less colour-reliable than standard HTML-based
>galleries?
>
>At the bottom of all these questions, the basic issue here is that getting any
>kind of consistency between a colour-managed workflow at the (colour-management
>aware) photographer's end and what comes out on a web browser is a crap-shoot.
>The whole purpose of colour management is that it should be consistent and
>predictable. It isn't pilot error, so the industry needs to address why this is
>happening, and solve it.
>
>
>Mark
>
>
________________________________
From:Tom Lianza <email@hidden>
>To: MARK SEGAL <email@hidden>; edmund ronald <email@hidden>
>Cc: ColorSync Users Mailing List <email@hidden>
>Sent: Sun, May 1, 2011 9:03:40 AM
>Subject: Re: Color management in web browsers
>
>Re: Color management in web browsers Mark and all,
>
>Every wide gamut display that I know of, has an adjustment to Rec.709/sRGB
>primaries. Mark, if you carefully prepared your images to CMYK/Fogra39
>standards, and someone printed them incorrectly, say to SWOP standards who is at
>fault? In your own home, you can adjust your TV to many different looks, none of
>which are “standard” because you don’t have the proper tools to set up for the
>standard. If you are posting ADOBE RGB images to the web, you are violating the
>WEB standard. If sRGB images appear over-saturated and unbalanced, the problem
>is with the display calibration, it has nothing to do with a web browser and
>definitely nothing to do with standards.
>
>The point is not that “people with standards” are being ignored. The fact is
>that some people want to ignore the standard or “improve” the standard without
>taking the time to understand the standard, or work on these committees that
>produce the standards.
>
>
>A small fraction of one percent of displays are calibrated today. Even at the
>high end, the attach rate for calibration is at best 10% on a model by model
>basis. Those who calibrate or set their displays properly will see consistent
>display of images, if those who, “carefully controlled hue and saturation for
>sharing on the internet” rendered perceptually to sRGB. To be frank, in my own
>workflow on the Mac, with an Epson R2400 and HP dreamcolor display, I convert to
>profile using the ICC V4 sRGB and print to the printer using the Epson sRGB
>setting (printer color management). Setting the dream color to sRGB and
>printing to an sRGB standard gives very predictable results in a print path that
>is very broken from a color managed standpoint. If I take that mapped image and
>put it on the web, it will print reliably on any consumer image printer, because
>their default assumption is sRGB. The WEB is output referred, there is a
>standard assumption that colors will be mapped in a standard form. If you
>depart from this standard, you will get unpredictable results.
>
>The whole sRGB issue has been looked at within the ICC. If you go to
>www.color.org <http://www.color.org> and select the “New v4 sRGB profile” link
>on the right side, you will see that there are a number of profiles that can be
>used. The V4 profile perceptual intent utilized many observers and may output
>devices in its testing. If you read the referenced white papers, you will see
>that it is not a trivial issue to follow standards.
>
>The web browser is not like an application that runs on your computer. Because
>of security standards on the desktop, the browser has no direct access to
>memory, files, or display settings. That is all handled by the OS. Whey you
>pull down the file menu to print, you inherit all the capabilities that the OS
>allows you to inherit, it is not up to the browser. Display color management
>is not part of the browser either. The real problem is display calibration at
>the end user site.
>
>Mark, I honestly don’t know what principle you are rejecting. If the receiver
>has properly adjusted the display for sRGB viewing and you have properly
>rendered your images to sRGB, then you have both followed the standard. If you
>want to do something else, you are not following the standard. If you want to
>change the standard, then you will have to discuss this with the HTML standard
>folks and the W3C folks. Don’t blame the vendors for ignoring your vision of
>what the standards should be. They don’t write the standards.
>
>Now, if someone said we should revisit the sRGB specification with respect to
>the web and latest display technologies, I would work on that problem. The sRGB
>spec was CRT display based and there is reason to look at the new technologies
>given that the CRT is gone. I think that you find, that there won’t be much
>departure from the original sRGB with respect to primaries. There is too much
>legacy in video and still photography which both shared those primaries.
>
>Regards,
>Tom
>
>
>On 4/30/11 1:12 PM, "MARK SEGAL" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>
>I find this quite astonishing. If I carefully prepare images for web-browsing
>which have carefully controlled tonality, hue and saturation for sharing on the
>internet, and the result ends-up being over-saturated and unbalanced, as I see
>happening in Firefox and Internet Explorer - but interestingly not Safari - I'm
>not happy. There seems to be an assumption in certain decision-making quarters
>that people with standards are such a small part of the market that their needs
>should be ignored. I reject this in principle.
>>
>>Mark
>>
>>
________________________________
From:edmund ronald <email@hidden>
>>To: Tom Lianza <email@hidden>
>>Cc: ColorSync Users Mailing List <email@hidden>
>>Sent: Sat, April 30, 2011 11:52:17 AM
>>Subject: Re: Color management in web browsers
>>
>>Tom,
>>
>> Does this mean that the ICC has no interest in defining guidelines
>>and standards for web and on-screen display color management ?
>>
>>Edmund
>> _______________________________________________
>>Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
>>Colorsync-users mailing list (email@hidden)
>>Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
>>
>>This email sent to email@hidden
>>
>>
The information contained in this e-mail and any accompanying attachments may
contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from
disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, or if this
message has been addressed to you in error, please immediately alert the sender
by reply e-mail and then delete this message and any attachments. Any
dissemination, distribution or other use of the contents of this message by
anyone other than the intended recipient is strictly prohibited. The company
accepts no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this
email or any attachments.
The information contained in this e-mail and any accompanying attachments may
contain information that is privileged, confidential or otherwise protected from
disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, or if this
message has been addressed to you in error, please immediately alert the sender
by reply e-mail and then delete this message and any attachments. Any
dissemination, distribution or other use of the contents of this message by
anyone other than the intended recipient is strictly prohibited. The company
accepts no liability for any damage caused by any virus transmitted by this
email or any attachments.
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Colorsync-users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden