Gammas and Color Spaces and Saturation, oh my!
Ugh. Last night I was editing some photos in Aperture. They looked bright and vibrant. I uploaded a couple to Flickr with FlickrExport Lite for Aperture and thought all was well. When I went and looked at them in Firefox, however, the images were flat - a lot less colorful and bright than they had been in Aperture. This screenshot shows what it looked like in Firefox (on the left) and in Aperture (well, the screenshot is from Safari, but it looked the same):
Not really having seen this before, I didn’t know where to look for the problem. Was it an issue with Aperture and the way it exports color? Or maybe the FlickrExport program did something before uploading? Maybe it was Flickr itself! After a bunch of googling, I came across some discussions on Flickr’s Aperture Users group with many of them having the same issue. It was all very confusing, and everything is complicated by uncalibrated monitors, different gamma settings between macs and PCs, and embedded color profiles in the images themselves. Ugh. I’d never dealt with any of this before, and it’s a lot to take in, so I’m still not entirely sure of myself when talking about this. At any rate, here are the conclusions I’ve drawn and how I fixed the problem on my computer. Please correct me if I’m wrong on any of this.
- Images for the web should contain an embedded color profile of sRGB for maximum compatibility between browsers and things.
- Therefore I ensured that Aperture was exporting with sRGB (and also was using sRGB for on-screen proofing - i.e. what it was showing me).
- Most browsers (Safari being the exception) are entirely unaware of color profiles for images and they assume sRGB based on a PC’s gamma value of 2.2. (A mac generally has a gamma value of 1.8.)
- I haven’t tested this one yet, but I think this means that my photos will therefore look correct on PCs, regardless of browser, since sRGB assumes their gamma value. The only place my photos would look incorrect are on browsers or programs that ignore color profiles on a mac.
- Exporting with sRGB therefore seems to be most likely to have my photos appear correctly to the widest audience. Windows users and Mac users using Safari.
- The solution for my own viewing purposes seems to be to use a browser that doesn’t ignore color profiles. I’m attached to Firefox, and didn’t really want to switch to Safari just because of this, so I was quite pleased to find out that Firefox 3 supports color management, but the option is turned off by default.
- So, I installed an add-on for Firefox 3 to allow me to enable color management. (The option is otherwise rather hidden and complicated to turn on.)
- Now, my colors are consistent between Aperture, Safari, Preview, and Firefox.
Huzzah!