June 22, 2008
Seeing Lightroom Colour better online.
With browser makers starting to see the light about colour management, we can finally see our colours as intended online. Safari has been doing this forever, but now Firefox 3 is colour managed. Except, it’s not on by default. So here’s how to do it.
In the address bar of Firefox, type in about:config.
Scroll down to gfx.color_management.enabled. By default it’s set to false. Double click on it to change it to true. Restart Firefox. Viola.
Version 3 is much faster, which of course is another bonus. Your Lightroom galleries and exports will now look better online.
While you can do it, the real question is should you? After all, what remains important is how your visitor sees your pictures, NOT how you see them. Any idea if you can detect through your visitor logs if the Firefox 3 visitor is in colour managed mode? Until you can do so, or Firefox change the default, the answer’s got to be “no”.
Hello.
Good news.
Whether and it is necessary to connect monitor profile?
P.S.: Forgive for my English
You can also choose to educate John. There’s no way it’ll change otherwise.
If you mean should you profile your monitor? Yes.
Not sure it’s educational to encourage people to switch their own colour management settings without mentioning the importance of the visitor’s settings. Would you teach someone to drive without telling them to pay great attention to other road users? And after all, how many times have you seen posts from Safari users who are puzzled their pictures don’t look right on other people’s screens?
For a detailed discussion of color management in Firefox 3, see my post “Firefox 3 For Photographers” on my site PixSylated.com (A click on my name should take you there.)
Also check the post out if you’d like a way to run both Firefox 2 and 3 simultaneously or Firefox 3 with and without color management.
Driving and web colour are hardly in the same league, and not a particularly apt analogy John. If that were the case, no one would be driving, for fear of others.
You can only start with yourself. And then work on others.
I’ve actually never seen any posts from puzzled Safari users, honestly, well colour related ones anyway.
No web colour management is a total crap shoot and there’s no way of knowing what your images are going to look like on any monitor with it. So you still have no idea how they look elsewhere.
I’d rather advocate people improving the situation for themselves and going from there with improving web colour for everyone.
Nice post Syl.
I see John’s point about being pragmatic, but as an idealist and long-term thinker, I’d rather see everyone turn on color management, and have everyone upload pictures with embedded profiles.
It’s a chicken and egg problem — we’ll never move forward unless someone is willing to take the first step. I say, let’s all take that step, and encourage our peers to do the same.
This is the only realistic way to get closer to the future dream world where we all actually see the same thing on our screens.
Considering that a web browser (or any application) that isn’t color managed is showing a user science fiction in terms of the color numbers, I can’t see why anyone would argue not using color management! The alternative is simply chaos. It ensures the same color numbers don’t preview the same for all users. Yes education is useful. And it would have been useful if FireFox didn’t make turning on the feature so bloody complicated.
Note, none of this requires embedded profiles. Safari isn’t doing users a service by using display RGB as the assumed profile for untagged web images. FireFox does assume, as a correct default, sRGB. Apparently Safari beta 4 may fix this. And the other good news is that Flash 10 is finally color managed (other wise, the browser will not help you here).