It was actually Microsoft and HP who came up with a very simple idea: let’s use the same box of crayons for all photos on the Internet. And since we expect the Internet to be viewed on TV and TV to be viewed on the Internet, we’d better choose crayons that work for both.

Apple went its own way with painful results. Here’s 1 photo, 3 browsers, 4 different colors:

Every Windows browser — such as Internet Explorer & Firefox — adhere to The Simple Idea: just post your photo and don’t bother to bloat it with an ICC profile that a TV can’t understand anyway, and I’ll draw your photo with the crayons of sRGB.

On the Mac, the browsers Internet Explorer and Safari look for an ICC profile (few photos on the net have them) and use whatever box of crayons it specifies. In that case, what you see on your Mac is not what someone sees on Windows, their TV, or the excellent Firefox browser, which many Mac owners use.

It gets worse.

On the Mac, when no ICC profile is embedded in the photo, it uses the crayons of your monitor profile. That is, unless you use Internet Explorer on the Mac and you’ve taken the time to go into preferences and check the box that says use ColorSync. Then IE uses the crayons of sRGB.

On Windows, TV, cell phones, etc., your browser uses sRGB no matter what your monitor profile may be.

It gets worse.

Macs come with monitor profiles that are quite different than the ones on Windows machines. They are lighter, for one thing. Which is why photos look lighter on Macs than they do on Windows, TV, etc.

And that tricks many photographers into receiving darker-than-desired prints. That’s because the same box of crayons (sRGB) that works well on TV also works well for photographic prints using commercial printers, so the sRGB tide has swept all the major ones: Kodak, Shutterfly, Costco, Wolfe’s, Walgreen’s, EZ Prints, whcc, MPIX, Photobox, etc. They don’t know that you’re viewing photos on a Mac and that you think they’re lighter than they really are.

If you’re interested in seeing how your photos look to the rest of the world, you can go to the Apple menu > Preferences > Displays > Color and choose sRGB (it was called TV before the OS X Tiger release). You’ll also need to use the Firefox browser. No sacrifice there — it’s great.

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.

Here’s an example: the right and left images, below, are the exact same copy of the same photo — one displayed in Photoshop and one in a browser (Firefox):

One possibility is your photo is in a color space other than sRGB, the only one the Internet can display correctly.

The thing is Photoshop knows about color spaces and your browser doesn’t (except for the strange case of two Mac browsers). Your browser bets that everything it sees is in the sRGB color space. And when it loses that bet? Your photo looks awful.

The other reason defies the experts and tortures endless photographers who can’t find the answer: Photoshop (and some other desktop programs) use your monitor profile and your web browser doesn’t. You can think of a monitor profile as a scouting report: it tells Photoshop your monitor is weak on blues, so amp those up, but the greens are too vibrant, so subdue them.

Photoshop bets your monitor profile is the key to displaying your colors accurately. And when it loses that bet? Your photo looks awful.

To make Photoshop and your browser look almost identical, choose sRGB as your monitor profile. Then continue with life. One less thing.

(On the Mac, they called it TV before the Tiger release of OS X because they couldn’t choke out the term sRGB, a Microsoft/HP-inspired standard.)

Here’s how you do it on Windows:

Go to Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > Color Management. You should see a dialog like this one:

Enjoy the newfound harmony between Photoshop and your browser.

But…but… Why did my monitor profile suck? Alas, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the people who wrote it.

Disagree? Have something to add? Post it!