Comments on: Just use sRGB

By: psu

psu — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 11:38:20 +0000

You are right about Safari. In fact, pictures tagged with sRGB look pretty similar in Safari to what you see on an uncalibrated PC without you needing to mess around with the screen calibration on the Mac. That is actually why I started just tagging everything with sRGB in the first place.

By: Chris Hanson

Chris Hanson — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 03:31:53 +0000

I believe Safari will use a color profile embedded in an image if one is present, and if not, will assume the image is in sRGB and will match it to whatever display the user is showing it on.

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.

By: psu

psu — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 02:53:48 +0000

I dunno. I have a collection of pictures that I’m pretty happy with and I’ve never calibrated a screen. I think maybe that most modern hardware is not really far enough off that you can hurt yourself. And, on Macs anyway, the OS does just enough transparent color management to get you pretty close.

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.

By: Doug

Doug — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 02:40:51 +0000

Wow, I really like reading tea leaves for the food reviews/suggestions and interesting take on games. But you can’t make color corrections to images if your monitor has a green cast to it. Calibration is really not that expensive and it’s the only way you can know that the color you see on your monitor is anything close to what will print regardless of what color space you use.

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.