Why ICC profiles don’t fly on the Internet
If I say scouting report, you get what I mean fast. A scouting report on a baseball pitcher tells you how fast he throws, which way his curveball curves… Simple.
When I say ICC profile, your eyes glaze and you click over to CNN. But it’s just a scouting report for photos.
The trouble with scouting reports for baseball players is, who has the time to read them? Only the people who make their living hitting home runs. Fans don’t.
The trouble with ICC profiles is, who has time to read them? Consumers don’t. Profiles make it so that small photos download on modems at one-third the speed. Photos are already slow and you can bet sites like CNN won’t slow their sites down by adding profiles.
So the Internet standardized on saving photos one way so that scouting reports aren’t needed. Internet browser software like Internet Explorer and Firefox say, “Eh. Profile schmofile. I’m painting this photo according to the Internet standard and if some schmuck saved it wrong, his loss.” Love it or hate it, the Internet standard is sRGB.
But…but… Color gurus like Bruce Fraser have ranted about the lack of ICC profile support for years. Why?
When I worked for Steve Jobs, I convinced him to give the keynote address at UNIX Expo. We were developing what was to become Mac OS X on top of UNIX, which seemed so powerful a combination — Steve’s legendary ability to make things simple, built on UNIX power.
He didn’t want to go. But the most renowned computer scientists would be there and we believed we had an answer to UNIX’s most vexing problem: it’s usability. Surely they would give Steve credit for trying, no?
He was right and I was wrong. The most talented programmers of the day ripped him for ruining computing, dumbing it down for grandmothers.
I thought it so strange that they could understand the most difficult problems of computer science, but couldn’t see what every pedestrian on the street could see: that simplicity is power.
After years of books and columns about color management, how many people understand it? No more than the people who understand how to use raw UNIX, or less.
That’s why the sRGB tide has swept commercial printers and Internet browsers and why 99% of both ignore ICC profiles even if you embed them.
