Tweak Firefox to Display Richer Colors

For those of you Mozilla users out there this may be of interest. It's specifically for Firefox 3 so if you haven't done already think about upgrading your plugins and themes will catch up soon.

Article on Life Hacker @

http://lifehacker.com/396742/tweak-firefox...y-richer-colors

If the digital photo you just uploaded looks more washed out in Flickr than it does in your desktop image editor, that's because Firefox 3's advanced color management capability isn't turned on by default. To turn it on, type about:config in Firefox 3's address bar, then click the "I'll be careful, I promise!" button. Then, in the Filter field, type gfx.color_management.enabled and set that value to true (its default value is false). Restart Firefox. From there on in, your photo colors will be richer than they were. Why isn't this value true by default? Well, according to Mozilla, you'll see a 10-15% performance hit using this setting, but if you've got a reasonably fast machine, it'll be worth the better-looking photos. Hit the link below for an extended explanation of Firefox's color profile support.

I would disagree that the colours are (always) richer. This feature just means that Firefox will now honour embedded colour profiles meaning the colours will be "accurate" if a) you have a calibrated monitor and B) the person that created them had a calibrated monitor.

I have found that under a large number of conditions the colours are less rich - but that is because they are meant to be.

interesting... I tried it, but don't see any before/ after differences on my flickr pics.

edit: I had already upgraded to 3.0 so I can't compare vs old 2.0

The biggest points here I think are,

1) Firefox 3 can be colour Calibrated (when feature is turned on

2) We had a thread a while ago about images on photo store sites not looking as vibrant as they should .. this feature should fix that.

I'm not a techy calibration kinda guy, but that what I read it all to mean.

http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2008/06/21/firefox-3-and-c.html

that has a bit more a a write up about it, but at the end of the day, uploading photos will always be the same and not every browser and person using that browser will be seeing them how they were intended to be seen until they have the colour profile reading turned on.

Whether or not you see an difference in the "vibrancy of color" in your images depends a lot on what color profile is embedded in the images that you're looking at as well as the gamut of the monitor that you're viewing them on.

Most images on the net have been converted to the sRGB color profile specifically so un-managed software would view them with a reasonable degree of color accuracy on just about any hardware. Viewing images with embedded sRGB profiles in color managed software Vs un-managed software will reveal little if any perceivable difference. The big difference is if you upload images with alternate profiles such as adobeRGB.

There are a couple of other web browsers that have been color managed for quite a while now. Most notably safari (mac and windows) and Konqueror (Linux, solaris, etc). Unfortunately, few people are using such browsers and that means that your best option is still to convert your images to sRGB so you can be confident about what others will see when they look at your art.

If you'd like to see an extreme case of what happens when an application isn't color managed check out the test image here with a color managed web browser and an unmanaged browser.

Cheers,

Mike

Until the vast majority of people are on browsers have color management by default (which will take a long, long time), I will leave this feature off. I want to see the web as most people see it, mostly as a sanity check for someone who produces a lot of web content. If I accidentally upload an image that is in AdobeRGB 1998 or Pro Photo RGB color space, I want to see it as being washed out so I realize my mistake!

Still, I'm glad that a mainstream browser has finally added the feature, even if it is off and hidden by default.

When I look at the following images from a recent dive of mine with IE 6.0 (which does not manage colours) to Firefox 3.0 with colour management, I see quite a big difference and most of the images are actually less "vibrant" with Firefox 3.0. They were created using sRGB colour profile on my PC with a Lenovo L220x LCD monitor (which has a very wide colour gamut) that has been calibrated with a Gretagmacbeth Eye-one Display 2.

http://atj.net.au/Dive200851711Bare_Island.html

Note they appear the same in Lightroom, CaptureNX, Firefox 3.0 and Safari, but different in IE 6.0.

I agree with Eric. Anyone who is posting images to the web and not encoding with sRGB might be better served getting the immediate feedback for their mistakes.

I wonder if Firefox, when adding this feature, also emulated Apple's bug in not setting the default (untagged) space to sRGB? Apple sets it to the monitor space which would be close to correct if Apple didn't also screw up the default monitor gamma.

It would be nice if proper color management was pervasively implemented on the web, but since the output device is a monitor all we really need is a consistent color space standard that is well designed for the target. We have that now with sRGB. If only Apple would implement that correctly as all other platforms do.