Color Management & Firefox 3

I've been a user and supporter of Firefox for some time now, and have anxiously awaited the release of Firefox 3

with its support for color management. Well, I've been using it since they published the various release

candidates, and...

 

I wonder if any others here are seeing what I'm seeing. With color management enabled, I'm getting some quite

distinct and unpleasant color casts when compared directly to the same image viewed in PS3 or Irfanview (with

color management add-on). Colors are closer to correct when I turn the feature off!

 

Just to be clear, I use hardware generated monitor profiles, I have enabled color management, and even explicitly

entered the location of my default profile, as my initial hope was that it wasn't picking up that profile

automatically as it should have. The color cast remained the same. I do note that there's a report on Rob

Galbraith's site which describes a fair number of folks seeing this on Macs, but not on a PC as I am (running XP).

 

Any other Firefox color-cast sufferers out there on either platform? Any clues as to cause or solutions to the

problem?

 

Scott

Maybe the behavior is defaulting to Absolute Colorimetric.

FireFox on my Mac operates as it should, matches Safari and all other ICC aware applications.

Have you pointed FF to the right profile? (Note that it only works with one monitor.)

Thanks for the responses. From everything I've seen and read, I assume that it does work fine for most folks. It seems to work OK on my laptop as well, but I'd love to hear from anyone who's seeing what I am (and even more so if you've discovered the cause). There are at least some indications that I'm not alone in seeing this.

 

Just to clarify, I have verified and re-verified that I've pointed FF to the right monitor profile. In fact, the only reason that I explicitly pointed to a profile at all was in the hope that perhaps my problem was due to the fact that it wasn't properly picking up the default. The end result is the same doing things either way.

 

Scott

Interesting question about FF3 on Mac. How does one know it's color sync'd? The display and colors looks the same as

Safari, and even the fonts seem to match now (didn't before). I can't find the information anywhere that I can find where it

shows it is sync'd. Or is it with the installation?

Hi Scott,

Have you tried going to system32>spool>drivers>color and deleting all other display drivers? It may be easier to locate any not meant to be used by going to system32>colcpl where they are listed under types.

Also if you are using ,say, Prophoto RGB make sure that the profile to display it is in colcpl.

 

Roger

Roger,

 

Thanks for the suggestion - I really do appreciate any and all ideas on this.

 

In this case, however... whenever I recalibrate, I always delete the old profile, so I don't have any extraneous

monitor profiles hanging around.

 

Scott,

 

Sorry, I'm not sure how FF handles this on the Mac. In the PC world, color management is enabled by typing

"about:config" in the browser's address field, scrolling down to a field called: "gfx.color_management.enabled",

and setting it to "true", and then restarting the browser. The following

field:"gfx.color_management.display_profile" may optionally be set to the monitor profile to be used, though if

left unset, it should use whatever the default is. There is also a beta plug-in which automates this process.

Perhaps this info will help.

 

There are a number of sites you can go to in order to determine if color management is enabled in your browser.

Here's one of the more popular ones: http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter .

 

Scott

I had a problem before with version 3. Every color profile I made left me with my blues having a distinct purple tint. It was either learning how to create an accurate profile, or reformatting my system that resolved the problem.

It is very hard to find JPEG images on the Web with embedded or referenced ICC, but those that I found looked fine, so I'm afraid I have no suggestions for you, Scott.

 

That said, I do not see the point of enabling color management in the browser, because it just encourages photographers to embed profiles, thereby increasing the size of every JPEG by 4 KB for no useful purpose.

<p>Bill,</p>

<p>Sorry I haven't updated this thread, but it was old enough that I figured it didn't matter. The issues are long since resolved, and were actually a problem with my monitor profile. It's a long and convoluted tale, but Firefox was fine.</p>

<p>As to not seeing the point of color management in a browser I respectfully disagree. I use a wide gamut monitor, and web browsing without color management enabled is an exercise in hideous. Even if I didn't run wide gamut, it's frustrating to have web images appear differently (and incorrectly) to a calibrated monitor than they do in, say, PS. What you may not know is that, assuming people have done what has long been recommended and have posted their on-line jpegs as sRGB, having an embedded profile isn't really required, as FF assumes sRGB in untagged images (and I believe that Safari does the same). </p>

<p>The bottom line is that FF's color management is not just desirable to me, it's essential. And fortunately, it does work. :-)</p>

<p>Scott</p>

Scott, thanks for revisiting. Nice photos of steam trains on your website, BTW! I wish my clouds looked as good as yours. Everything in your Color portfolio looks great without enabling Firefox color management, because (I'm assuming) you posted sRGB, as "has been long recommended." So why is Firefox color management essential? Are you saying that your website would look awful with a wide gamut monitor and Firefox defaults? Did you post any images with embedded or referenced color profile? I did not see any in your Color portfolio. Website www.gballard.net has examples of embedded color profiles, but in all cases, I believe those colors could easily be matched in sRGB.

<a href="http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00SlmZ">On this thread</a>, Libby Ross says viewing non-color managed images on a wide-gamut monitor overly increases saturation. So if you have one, set gfx.color_management.enabled. On my normal gamut monitor, I have not yet found a website where it helps.