Colour management and the Amazing Colourchanging Bike

[Overread]

**note not my shot**

This bike should be green it really should be a nice green colour. But not all internet browsers and computer OS systems will display it as green. Infact if you download and view the image on your computer (taking out the internet browser factor) the bike might still not be green!

For a better explination check out -
<img src="http://blogs.msdn.com/photos/color_blog-images1/images/542409/original.aspx" border=0 height=87 width=760> : Profile utilization test image and profile

I am sure there are those here who will understand this better than I - for now all I can say is that with Opera internet browser and Vista as my OS the bike is blue (as are the people too)

 

[JustAnEngineer]

It's green in FireFox under Vista, but if you download the image and look at it with Windows Photo Gallery, you get the original red color.

P.S.: It's also green in FireFox under Windows 7, but it's blue in Internet Explorer.

 

[Garbz]

It's green in any version of FireFox Beyond 3.5, and green in any version of FireFox beyond 3.1 beta 2 if you enable gfx.color_management.mode;1

It's red in any program that uses the Windows Colour System to manage colours rather than coding their own (including photoshop if you use WCM as the conversion engine rather than ACE)

For those that don't know:
Basically the idea of this test is simple. The image has an embedded ICCv2 profile which flips the colours called Microsoft BGR Test Profile. Any input colour managed program will honour the ICC profile and adjust the colours so that it displays "correctly". Any program that does not honour input profiles (Opera, IE, , some versions of safari, every other browser) will just assume the blue value of 255 means as bloody blue as you can get rather than green.

The other thing that is embedded in this image is a WCS specific profile, available if your
application is running under Vista or 7, and is using the WCS API to convert colours. This is Microsoft's continuation of Embrace Extend Exterminate where by they take 100% openly supported standards and try to bloody do it their own way. Interestingly I have noted that WCS sucks and support is poor.

Well ok it doesn't suck, it finally provides an API so that applications may include colour management without explicitly coding the conversions themselves, however I have noticed that every application that uses the WCS API produces worse results than Photoshop's and Firefox's own conversion engines. Whether or not this is a crap implementation of a good API or just a crap API I don't know and frankly I don't care. All I know is that something isn't perfect when WCS is used to adapt and convert ICC profiles.


What ICC means for photographers out there is the ability to work with images that are more colourful than you can display. Most screens typically can display a subset of standard colours which are useful enough, but don't quite touch the pure quality of cameras, scanners, and very high quality chemical printing. ICC profiles are what can be used to convert input (camera) data, to working (your file) data, and working (your file) data to output (your printer/monitor) data.