On Dec 20, 2005, at 12:27 PM, Rob Studdert wrote:
On 19 Dec 2005 at 17:12, graywolf wrote:
I believe that most of them assume sRGB.
I think you'll find that most of them simply don't care, web
authors assume
that the average desk-top calibration is a reasonable approximation
of sRGB, I
don't believe that any Windows browsers actually re-map colours,
they just
provide a linear output to the screen. (not any that I've tested on
multiple
Windows platforms anyhow).
I think you're right about that. sRGB is actually a pretty close
match to most computer screens - IIRC that was by design, and the
cynic in me suspects that the reason is that MS wouldn't have to
write a proper colour management engine for screen rendering.
Safari and Mac IE just hook into ColorSync where all the work is done
for them. I thought there was a setting somewhere that tells
ColorSync what to assume if the file is untagged, but I can't find it
now I suspect I'm thinking of Photoshop's colour settings.
Mozilla on the Mac is apparently capable of using ColorSync as well:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/colorsync/
To be honest I think users of other platforms are SOL.
Having said that it you need to be careful if you start applying
profiles to web images. Anything that is supposed to blend into the
page background colour will not work if the image is saved with a
profile. This is because there is no colour space explicitly
associated with the HTML colour codes so they are just assumed to be
already in the monitor's colour space. So in a colour managed
browser the image background colour is converted but the page
background isn't. The difference is subtle - you see a faint border
- but it's noticeable. I found this out the hard way when doing some
web graphics.
Because of this I convert all photos to sRGB and save with a profile,
and any other web graphics are left untagged (they're almost always
exported from Fireworks which doesn't understand profiles, perhaps
deliberately).
I still have a CS test page up on the web that I posted whe we were
discussing
this very same issue last April:
http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/~distudio/temp/ICC_test.html
I'm not sure when I did this but it's very similar in concept:
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/profile_test/
Basically if the bottom 3 pics all look the same then your browser
does colour management. If not, the bottom row will look the same as
the top row.
Here's another one which tests support for ICC version 2 and 4 profiles.
http://www.color.org/version4html.html
- Dave
