Color management and MS PCs

[Stephen Willard]

I use an iMac which has color management built in. I was just on an older MS PC to look at my website and everything looked awful. The brouser was Internet Explorer. It occurred to me that the older MS PC may not have had color management built in which could possibly account for the horrible appearance of my website photographs.

To create an image for my website, I set Photoshop color settings as follows:

Work Spaces settings:

RGB: sRGB IE61966-2.1
SMYK: U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2
Gray: Gray Gamma 2.2
Spot: DOT Gain 20%

Color Management Policies:

RGB: Off
SMYK: Off
Gray: Off

Preview is clicked on.

When I load a scanned print into Photoshop I remove any profiles embedded in the tiff file. After making all my changes with Photoshop I then save the file using File/Save for Web...

I do not believe that a profile is embedded in the file when I save the changes using Save for Web..., but I am not sure. My thinking is that most browsers will default to sRGB IE61966-2.1 if no profile is embedded and that the jpeg files will be a lot smaller. I believe when I placed a profile in the jpeg it almost doubled in size.

I also calibrate my new iMac using huey with the System Preference/Display brightness scale set to approximately 75% of a 100% in a dark room.

Am I doing everything correctly? Please note that I am not Photoshop or color management savvy.

Thanks for any considerations.

[Ben Hopson]

If you are not doing so, try converting to sRGB color space before saving for web.

Ben

[Ken Lee]

Windows/Mac/Unix, Color Management or not, the Windows monitor needs to be calibrated too, with a professional tool like Eye One.

[Klyment Tan]

Regardless of O/S, on top of having your monitor calibrated and a profile created and specified in the operating system, most web browsers are, by default, colour space unaware. As Ben suggested, convert to sRGB first or else your Adobe RGB files will look somewhat desaturated (on most screens) and your ProPhoto RGB files will look sickly. That's because without colour space awareness, most web browsers will render colours to the native colour space of the monitor. For most monitors, sRGB is a close approximation display gamut. For some wide gamut displays, Adobe RGB may be a closer approximation. sRGB files may look oversaturated on a wide gamut display if the browser is not colour space aware.

If you have Firefox installed and want to quickly verify whether the colour issues you're noticing with your website are due to the colour space that you've used for web-purposed files, type into the address bar "about:config" (without quotation marks). It'll come up with a curiously-worded warning. Click okay or continue and in the filter box type "gfx". There should be three or four options that come up, one of them being colour management. You can toggle this setting to be enabled or disabled. Restart your browser and look at your website again.