So here’s my question: why won’t Smugmug just leave the profile I embed in-place in the first place? If you’re not going to do that, could you at least also apply sRGB on-the-fly for us Firefox 3.x users?

First, I love Smugmug and the service it offers, and I love the insight on these blogs.

There is lots of good information here on displaying the right colors for web presentation, but what about accurate colors in print?

I use an end-to-end color calibrated workflow to ensure that what I see during edit, will be exactly what my customers will see in final print. Therefore I assign an ICC profile to images and use a print lab that uses this profile. It is rare that a print does not match my monitor image.

So, if I must apply sRGB to my images for them to display correctly on Smugmug, my ICC profile will not be used by the Smugmug print lab for the printed images (they will of course use sRGB and it will not be True Color as I have intended).

Additionally, if I use my ICC profile for Smugmug images to print properly, they will not display correctly, and my customers will not order images because they dont like the presented colors on Smugmug.

Is there a simple fix for this? Additionally, there is significant color shift from images uploaded to Smugmug vs those uploaded to my other website hosted by an internet provider. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers,

Martino

What a great and very knowledgeable response. I’ve been meaning to update this post for awhile and your response adds a lot of good info.

Two things that have changed since I wrote the post:

1. We add ICC profiles on the fly to color-aware browsers like Safari. If you view a photo on SmugMug with IE, there won’t be a profile because IE ignores them, but in Safari you will see it.

We did this because of customer demand.

2. However… One thing none of our customers anticipated was that even in Safari, Flash ignores the profile. There was also great demand for Flash slide shows because they are so smooth and beautiful. So, you see your photos with Safari doing the right thing until you click the slideshow button and then you’re back to ignoring ICC profiles. Adobe has said they’ll fix this but I have no idea when.

Our really knowledgeable customers are grateful that we attach ICC profiles for Safari, but I feel it was a mistake. It’s too frustrating and confusing for most Safari users. Adobe, Apple and even the ICC consortium, who pressured us to attach them, don’t attach them on their sites.

Even Andrew Rodney uses Flash to display his photos on the web and he is one of the web’s biggest champions of attaching ICC profiles.

I hope this helps.

Chris

Let me first explain the concept better. Your monitor, as well as photos contain a range of color intensities (eg make this dot 75% red, 13% green, etc). However, what I think of when I say yellow (”canary”) might not be what you think of when you say yellow (”the sun”). This is where color profiles come in. A monitor profile says “yellow for me is canary”. A profile in your photo says “yellow for me is the sun”. These profiles allow software to say “oh, the monitor thinks yellow is canary but the photo thinks its the sun so lets adjust yellow when we display it”. With me so far?

Here’s where it gets hairy. Monitors (like anything, really) are not all the same. Out of the box, your monitor might display yellow as mountain dew green. Because of this, Windows by default does not have a profile associated to the monitor (how could it - it doesn’t know what your monitor shines at you when it’s told to show yellow). It could, if it had eyes. That’s what profiling your monitor is. A device is used to measure the monitor and then you do something with the measurements. One of two things can be done. Either you measure the monitor as-is which creates a profile and then assign the profile to windows (poof…now windows programs can know what yellow will look like) OR as an alternative you calibrate the monitor’s colors to some known standard (like sRGB) and tell windows to use an sRGB profile. Make sense?

The breakdown and arguments come from the following: Pro photographers as well as photoshop are aware of color profiles and color accuracy. So, when you view a photo in photoshop, it reads the profile from windows and PROPERLY displays your photos. On the other hand, you have the web full of people who never calibrate their monitors and so most browsers don’t bother with color correction. This is made worse by a large percentage of web photos not containing their own profile. Without that, a browser still can’t know how to do any adjustment. So if you view photos on the web, in actuality it’s a crap shoot as to what color spectrum its creator used or intended for it to be viewed with.

The only reasonable ways to view the web are either to use no profile at all or use sRGB. The problem with using sRGB is a lot of web designers know that most users today are using uncalibrated LCD monitors which are a FAR cry from the sRGB color spectrum. So many designers make photos simply look good for most uncalibrated monitors (often because they too are unaware of color profiles). Assigning an sRGB profile to windows without actually calibrating your monitor to show sRGB is NOT a solution. All that would accomplish is to make photoshop and other color-aware programs calibrate with wrong data about your monitor’s color spectrum. The solutions are to either CALIBRATE your monitor to sRGB for sites like SmugMug that will assume sRGB or to PROFILE your monitor, viewing the web in the typical users’ uncalibrated state. (If you profile, remember to assign it to windows!!) Either way, at least it allows photoshop to adjust the colors to show you accurate colors. If you can’t afford to calibrate or profile your monitor, search the web for tools to allow you to adjust your monitor close to sRGB, etc by eye and then assign that profile to windows.

Hopefully now you see why people may get different colors in photoshop and on the web, as well as different results from different websites.

For us here using SmugMug (I am in my trial period right now), I would suggest calibrating to sRGB OR a white point close to your native display white point. Either will give you a realistic color spectrum with merely different color temperatures (ie like daylight white versus incandecent bulb white). To the novice, probably sRGB is the best bet…but be prepared for the web to look very yellow compared to what you are used to. sRGB is a very warm color spectrum dating back to warm-toned TV sets. The only reason I suggest it is because websites that are aware of color profiles generally assume sRGB (and we know what happens when we assume).

For the curious, I personally calibrated to my display’s native white point so whites are bright/hot and not yellow or dull. This makes the web look “normal” (ie as most users would see it) but gives me an accurate color spectrum and allows Photoshop to display correct color. This also gives programs like photoshop more colors to work with because I am not limiting my color spectrum to sRGB (for instance, sRGB doesn’t have certain “deep” toned colors defined).

So now that you have a better idea of all this, you might understand why those people that argue FOR a profile aware web browser are actually right. It should AT LEAST be a toggle option so we can all be happy (I wouldn’t make a good politician making both sides happy). If it were up to me, browsers would by default do no color correction for photos that are missing profiles but WOULD correct photos that DO have profiles because THAT’s WHY THEY’RE THERE!

My two cents…curious to see the replies!
Greg

Colour management isn’t really tricky in theory, yet in practice there seems to be a lot still to explain when it comes to some issues such as web browsers use / non use of screen profiles!

Does anyone know how to set the default icc profile in Photoshop to my Spyder2.icc profile? If I use the “Monitor Profile” setting, it turns color management off completely!

I apologize since I honestly have not spent a significant amount of time understanding Photoshop’s color management settings, but if someone has an answer, I’d appreciate it

My monitor is calibrated and I use system-wide colour management under Vista. Any photos meant for the web are converted to sRGB in Photoshop.

To test the theory I uploaded the same file both to SmugMug and to my webserver via http://FTP. The latter image is nearly identical to the final image in Photoshop, but the SmugMug hosted photo is oversaturated and colour-shifted, blowing out highlights and making everything ruddy.

http://www.gongzero.com/2008/04/24/testing-smugmug-gallery/

There’s the proof.

Is there a “don’t mess with my damned photos” setting in SmugMug’s control panel that I’m not seeing?

No need to throw color management out of the window just because you don’t understand it.

Yes, an image will look different in a web browser then in PS. That’s because the web browser isn’t color managed (except Safari and FF3) and PS is.

If you use sRGB for web images (as you should) the difference you see will be the difference between your monitors profile and sRGB, and should not be that big.

If you use an incorrect monitor profile (sRGB), you can correct all you want in PS, but the colors will never be what you expect them to be when printed or viewed on a different monitor, since your monitor is displaying wrong!