OK Godfrey - This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts until I figure it out.
First - in the context of this message I agree that the metadata isn't extraneous junk. Especially your copyright data. Now, let's talk about the ICC profile. If you're using a Mac, the ICC profile is not extraneous junk, assuming you have colorsync enabled. To Internet Explorer running on Windows, however, it's just plain not used. I resorted to the unthinkable and actually looked it up. Bruce Fraser and David Blatner, in Real World Photoshop CS2, in a section titled "To tag or Not to Tag?", page 150 write: "... we don't embed profiles in images destined for the Web. The very few Web browsers that pay any attention to embedded profiles assume that untagged RGB is sRGB, so we convert our web images to sRGB, then export the images without a profile." That left me wondering which browsers they were talking about so I checked Real World Color Management, second edition, by Bruce Fraser, Chris Murphy and Fred Bunting. In a section titled "Preparing Materials for the Non-Color-Managed Internet", page 302, they wrote: "The vast majority of Web browsers simply take the RGB values in files and send them unmodified to the screen. So unless you go and calibrate the monitor of every user who is likely to look at your site, you have no way of knowing exactly what they're going to see. <skip two paragraphs> The only color managed browsers we know of exist on the Macintosh. For Mac OS8,9 and X, it's Microsoft Internet Explorer. If you enable ColorSync in Explorer's Preferences, it will assume sRGB for untagged images and use the embedded profile in all other images." The other Mac browser they mention is called OmniWeb. They don't mention Safari, but given the lead times of books, it may not have been around when they were writing. So Internet Explorer on the Mac honors the profiles if ColorSync is enabled. Internet Explorer on Windows doesn't use them. These guys and the earlier quoted MacAskill could be wrong. Color management is confusing. I could be misinterpreting all of them. It sure as heck confuses me. In the end, my bottom line (for images destined for the web) is this. Embed the profile if I feel like it. It won't hurt the vast majority of folks and it might help a few. But if I don't embed the profile, practically no one will notice. See you later, gs <http://georgesphotos.net> On 4/23/06, Godfrey DiGiorgi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If you mean the metadata and the ICC profile, referring to them as > "extraneous junk" is foolish: they're important parts of a digital > capture image, if not essential parts. I like having my copyright and > the correct ICC profile incorporated into the file.
