clanthar
TPF Noob!
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2010
- Messages
- 767
- Reaction score
- 86
- Location
- Saint Louis MO
- Can others edit my Photos
- Photos OK to edit
That's because Firefox works properly and IE does not. Yes you can blame IE; it's inappropriate to use IE to display photos. Chrome by the way is like IE and should also not be used to display photos. Safari by the way works.
Photographs are tagged with an ICC profile that identifies the color space. Software that displays those photos should read that tag and display the photo accordingly. The numerical values assigned to the single pixels in a JPEG (RGB) photo are not hard values. They only have meaning in context. You can't decode those numerical pixel values to a color or tone for output if the context is removed or ignored. IE and Chrome ignore the context (ICC profile) and as a result they display all photos incorrectly.
Look carefully at the illustration below. You see the exact same color selected in Photoshop's color picker twice. Not the same color!? Of course not, but yes it. Read the RGB values for each -- they are identical. Read the HSB values for each -- they are identical. Note the Lab values however are different. Lab values are hard, and so of course since the two colors are in fact different they have different Lab valves. A pixel with Lab numerical values can only be one color. A pixel with RGB numerical values can in fact be dozens of different colors depending on the context (color space). RGB values are soft.
Since RGB values are soft, if you remove the context (color space) you in fact leave the colors and tones of your photo undefined. This is why no digital camera exists that will create a JPEG file without an embedded ICC profile that identifies the color space (context). The $49.00 GE P&S at Xmart embeds the ICC profile in its JPEGs. It would be nonsense for the camera to deliver a photo with the colors undefined.
In the illustration above I switched the color space (context) for the soft RGB values. Photoshop of course works properly and displays the right color for the numbers in context (color space).
Back to the practical world. The photo industry uses 4 common color spaces. If you open a RAW file in ACR you'll have the option to output to sRGB, Adobe RGB, Pro-Photo RGB or ColorMatch RGB. The same Lab (hard) color displayed in all four of those RGB spaces will have different soft RGB values.
No one color space is a best-fit match to every photographer's and printer's purpose. If there was one, we could stop this seemingly ridiculous behavior. sRGB was created in the mid 90s to be a best-fit match to electronic display technologies. Since then the consumer electronics world has appropriately embraced sRGB and the most recently available hardware is pretty sRGB compliant. As a result a photo processed and tagged with the sRGB color space has a best-fit chance to look about the same if it's profile is ignored. It is not correct to say that IE and/or the internet is sRGB by default. There's a difference between processing the profile tag and ignoring it. It's wrong to ignore it. It's even worse to strip it off which some budget and free photo editing software does. This problem is perennial and comes back time and time again as people place their photos on the internet and then ask, "Hey my photo changed! What happened?" What happened is the ICC profile was either stripped off or ignored.
What to do? Use good software like Firefox and Safari, but you can't make the rest of the world stop using cr*p like IE and Chrome. In that case when you place images on the internet make sure they're sRGB and hope for the best.
