I know Internet Explorer 4.5 for Mac and higher do this, if the “ColorSync Support” checkbox is checked, and it’s pretty impressive to watch. The easy way to see it (with IE4.5 or later on a Mac; I doubt this works with Safari) is to view a large color image with lots of “pure” colors from a slow source – think of a color webcomic from a server that’s being hammered. The image will display progressively, with colors that are either dark or washed-out. Then when the whole image is shown, the colors will be reasonable. I first noticed this with Sluggy Freelance in ’98 – Riff’s coat looked washed-out, and then didn’t.
This actually makes more of a difference on a Mac than on a PC because Macs and PCs still use quite different gammas. (PCs tend to use 2.2, Macs tend to use 1.8.) By doing color matching for every image, you get a reasonable approximation to what whoever created the image intended you to see. After all, chances are that whoever created the image was either working in Photoshop on a Mac with Photoshop set to use sRGB/2.2 – as it recommends for web images – or working on a PC with no calibration, which is what sRGB is intended to model.
]]>Note that my thesis here is not that you should *never* do this. All I’m saying is that you should know *why* you need to do it and how things work before you dive in, or you’ll just hurt yourself.
]]>Yes, all pictures that go to the web need to be in sRGB. There are valid reasons to use other color spaces. I’m not going to argue them here. Your choice of color space is really independent though from the decision to calibrate or not. The bottom line is you can’t make accurate color corrections without a calibrated monitor.
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