I liked the lighting. The original upload of this picture looked a bit wishy washy in most browsers. I’ve since fixed it – read on for more details.

Browser colour issues

Unfortunately the popular browsers don’t support the colour profiles embedded in most image files. This means that pictures viewed on the Internet are not always presented the way the photographer intended, which is an absolute travesty and a personal peeve. IE and Google Chrome are among the worst offenders. It is particularly bad when products like Google Picasa which purport to be photographic tools complete with editors ignore the embedded colour profile information.

Recently I’ve been using a Nikon Adobe RGB colour space for my pictures as it provides for a higher dynamic range – which I need to make the best of my pictures as I’m using a 14 bit camera.  However as described above most browsers fail to display the pictures properly. To get around this I’ve converted the jpeg images to the standard sRGB colour space used by default by the popular browsers. Of course this shouldn’t be necessary, but there you go.

The best browser I’ve found so far for viewing pictures is Firefox with a colour profile add-on.

You can check your browser’s compliance on this site: http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter

The Firefox profile add-on can be found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/907358/

There is a lot more information available on this issue, search for ‘browser color profile support’ and lose a few hours reading all about it.

21 June 2011 | Copyright © 2011 Gary Allman