Firefox color annoyance

[ewx]

Going through the latest set of photographs I'd got as far as uploading one, when I looked at it in Firefox on my iBook. It seemed rather washed out compared to how it had looked in Lightroom and (I quickly found) also compared to Preview and Safari.

The screenshot should give some idea of the difference:

The image is an sRGB JPEG; that is to say, the relationship between the numeric values and actual light frequencies is that defined by a standard called sRGB. This is what's expected for the web, to the point that most web browsers reportedly ignore embedded color profiles and assume sRGB; which makes it unlikely that Firefox was misinterpreting the JPEG.

However it was managing to misdisplay it. Next I compared the color profile of my display with sRGB, using Apple's handy tool to do so.

The colorful part of the image represents the gamut of the color LCD profile (i.e. the range of possible colors it can display). The white region around it represents the gamut of sRGB. As you can see there's quite a difference. So if the theory is that Firefox is displaying as if the display was sRGB even when it isn't, what result would we expect? Well, the effect would be that the gamut of the image itself is compressed; which is what we see.

It's a bit of a disappointment that Firefox bypasses the local color management stuff, though also a shame that it's convenient for it to do so. The upshot is that Firefox is not really suitable for displaying color images given the spread of LCDs (for anybody, not just for the producers of images).

(It happens to look fine under Linux Firefox on a system with a CRT. I did a similar comparison between sRGB and the color profile I determined for said CRT last time the Mac was connected to it, and they are very nearly identical. Which explains why the image looks fine under Linux Firefox.)

Comments

[gerald_duck]

If you'd taken a photo of a goth this would never have happened.

[bjh21.livejournal.com]

furrfu complained about this (http://furrfu.livejournal.com/76207.html) a few months ago.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

furrfu appears to be complaining about Firefox ignoring the image's embedded profile. This is true and mildly annoying but basically expected. You solve it by only putting sRGB images on the web, which most people do without even knowing that's what they're doing.

Off the web, if you're messing around with non-sRGB images you presumably have color-managed tools anyway.

I'm complaining about Firefox ignoring the display's profile, which means it misrenders everything when the display is not close to sRGB; not just non-sRGB images.

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

There is apparently a very good reason for not reprofiling everything. If you assume sRGB for unprofiled images then you have to alter all the CSS colours as well for them to match. If you're altering the CSS colours then they will cease to match what plugins like Flash or Java render, and suddenly a lot of sites look much worse.

Firefox's failure to respect the colour profile in the image is bad, but if the image was not labelled then it shouldn't assume anything.

Safari / WebKit did try the, "turn everything into sRGB," approach and it just didn't work when it met the real world.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting point. Are CSS/Flash/Java all defined to use the display's color space (whatever that may be) then? That's rather a shame l-(

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

This has been an annoyance to quite a lot of people for a while now, I can't remember what the behaviour is on Windows, but I seem to remember different browsers are broken in different ways on there.

I seem to remember a webpage somewhere with a series of pictures using flat greys and dither patterns that would let you see if colour profiles were being taken account of, and if your monitor was reasonably well calibrated.