B&W in RGB

Apart from always welcome comments on composition, light, etc., I'd

like to ask if you know how color profile impacts image's web display

behavior, specifically in terms B&W images saved in sRGB (this one)

and in Grayscale (the next one). This is exactly the same image with

no other adjustments made except slightly different crop; both look

identical in PS, but once uploaded on photo.net, the latter has

noticeably less contrast. Suspect it's a browser-related phenomena,

so should I always convert B&W pictures to sRGB before publishing them

on the Internet?

They look exactly the same for me.  I've downloaded your pict and look at them in every possible way. The only difference is the sharpness, maybe because the grayscale pict is much smaller than the rgb one.

And by the way, they are great.  Excellent job.

Thanks for checking that, Richard.  Then it must be down to my browsers' settings; I've compared in Firefox as well as in Safari, and the difference between the two versions of this image was very pronounced regardless of which browser I used to view them (not that I'm any wiser how to get around this ;)

Great composition and excellent use of lighting. Love the contrast and the use of negative space. Well done.

Very nice highlights!

This issue has frustrated me for a long time. There are indeed differences in the way browsers render colours. Your sRGB image (when compared to monochrome) has slightly more contrast in my Firefox, Opera, Chrome and IE. The difference is small but it's there. And it's consistent across the above browsers, and yes my monitor is calibrated. In the end a workaround for me was to always use RGB files, even for "monochrome" images.

Similarly, a few months ago a predominantly red image of mine looked OK in Firefox, but markedly desaturated in Opera, Chrome and IE ( http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=10989218 ). But when retesting now, the red looks desaturated in all 4 (ie. when compared to viewing in CS4 or Windows Explorer). Hopefully there are some webdesign and colour calibration gurus out there that can shed some light?

BTW I like your appreciation for the human form - you have a great eye - very beautiful studies :) Keep it up!