sRGB vs No Color Profile

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junbug1975

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Having some color profile issues:

- In LR Develop module everything looks good.
- I export out as jpeg using sRGB as my color profile
- Look at in apple preview, safari, and firefox. Color is a bit off. More purple and contrasty.
- I open the sRGB jpeg in PS CS4 looks just like it does in the LR Develop module

Monitor has been calibrated with Spyder Elite. Though I'm starting to think the Spyder in conjunction with my Dell monitor is looking a bit on the pink/purple side even after calibration.

What I don't understand is how for example a website like nytimes.com has their jpegs looking so good. I downloaded a couple and opened them in apple Preview and they look just like they do in Safari and Firefox. Curious I used Jeffrey's Exif Viewer ( http://regex.info/exif.cgi ) and saw that these jpegs don't have a color profile. They get an error:

"WARNING: No color-space metadata and no embedded color profile: Windows and Mac web browsers treat colors randomly."

Most of the jpegs on different websites that look great in my browser (on my suspect color calibrated montior) don't have an embedded color profile. My jpeg coming out of LR when run through Jeffrey's Exif Viewer says:

"Embedded color profile: “sRGB”"

So, what are they using and why do my sRGB files shift so much?

Thanks for any insight!!!
 
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Two questions before we can provide a complete answer:

(1) What version of Firefox, and do you have color management enabled?
(2) Have you tried recalibrating since making this observation?

Fundamentally, all color-managed should provide identical results. Preview and Safari are color-managed, so they should look just like LR and PS. Firefox 2.x is not color-managed. Firefox 3.'.x is not color-managed by default, but you can enable it. Firefox 3.5 beta is color-managed by default.

It is expected that files without profiles or tags should look different than those with profiles or tags, when viewed with color-managed tools. Normally I'd expect the files with profiles or tags to look better, provided you've got a proper calibration.

What really doesn't make sense in your description is that Preview and Safari look different than LR and PS. That shouldn't be true, and suggests a corrupt monitor profile, which is why I asked about recalibrating.
 
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Thanks for the reply!

(1) I'll have to check what version of Firefox I have and I never enabled it.
(2) Yeah, I actually recalibrated a couple of times yesterday. Same results. My monitor just looks like it has a weird pink/purple cast. A bit too contrasty too. Using Spyder Elite.

Strange, my sRGB files look great in Photoshop and Lightroom but awful in Safari, Preview, and Firefox.

I'll go back and try and retrace my steps and I'll get back to you about my Firefox specs.

Thanks
 
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Okay, then assuming you haven't enabled color management in Firefox, you should expect files that you export from LR to look different there than they do in LR, Safari, and Preview. If they really look the same, then either you've enabled color management, or something else funny is going on.
 
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even without colour management enabled Firefox should display sRGB files ok as that it was it defaults to. The files from nytimes.com look good in all these apps. Only your files look bad in non-colour managed apps so it's likely to be an issue with your colour managed apps LR & etc.... producing the wrong results.

Maybe the icc profile your calibration equipment has created is not working well with LR etc...
 
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sizzlingbadger said:
even without colour management enabled Firefox should display sRGB files ok as that it was it defaults to.
Click to expand...

Nik, that doesn't make sense. If it's not color-managed, it's not aware of any profiles. It cannot "default" to anything if it's not color-managed.

This is a common misconception; people say all the time that non-color-managed apps "default to sRGB". It's just not true. Unmanaged apps pass the RGB values directly to the display driver without any color translation at all.
 
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That's a 13-year-old recommendation that was, sadly, never adopted as a formal standard. There's a lot of good stuff in there, most of which has never been implemented here in the wild, wild west where far too few applications are color-managed.

It says, in practice, "Once page elements are converted to sRGB, the browser needs to interpret the color space correctly and use the OS color management to image the page."

It's ironic that two of the authors were employed by Microsoft... If only they'd followed through, the world would be a better place.
 
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:lol: :mrgreen:

I new it is old but never new it wasn't adopted like the older ITU-R BT.7'9 who was.
 
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I may not have described it very well (granted) but the issue remains the same, the sRGB values are being displayed directly by non managed look half reasonable. The colour managed apps are translating using a profile that is obviously not working.

(Most colour managed apps default to sRGB if no profile is provided in the image was what I was really thinking of when I wrote my last post)
 
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