dria - Latest Comments in Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Tony Mechelynck — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:07:07 -0000

For me, some favicons (including those for bugzilla.mozilla.org and software.opensuse.org) suddenly became ugly-ugly instead of pretty-pretty when the default was switched from "never" to "tagged-only" in Fx3 and Sm2 a few days ago, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45... including the attached JPEG screenshot. Disabling the feature made the favicons display correctly again.

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

dave1010 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:37:56 -0000

Maybe I'm missing something here, but in Firefox 2 I can see the screenshot of the enhanced FF3 image perfectly well. It looks like someone's tweaked the levels a bit. Here's my question: why not just export all images for the web in sRGB? Or, load them in FF3 with color profile support enabled, take a screenshot, and save the image again!

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

dave1010 — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 08:36:48 -0000

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

mikehaskew — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:46:17 -0000

my life is now better. i've been frustrated by Firefox's color for so long, I always kept Safari open to view photos. no more!

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Clayton — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:17:02 -0000

Yet another reason why mozilla is the best website browser! Anyone have a link to any study or review comparing firefox, safari, IE, and Netscape?

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

philw — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:59:53 -0000

Embedding profiles in jpegs is interesting but hardly significant, at least for Windows users.

The fact that FF3 with CM enabled reads and uses your monitor's profile is huge. Until this, FF (like IE etc) would just ignore the monitor profile. Now it renders colours the way their creators intended them to be seen. Forget embedded profiles, enjoy accurate managed colour in Windows.

I hesitate to mention it, but in Windows Vista at least, Safari does not deliver Colour Managed output - it does take note of embedded profiles, but it does not use the monitor's profile at all. That was such a shame but there it is.

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Rick — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:26:02 -0000

Shoot me down if you like as I am only a novice in this field, but I have been playing with it for a bit. I noticed, and other people have reported that, although switching this on fixes photographs to better colours, it messes up the rest of the screen - CSS colours etc. Mine went all pinkish. So my first thought was that we needed to set the display_profile in FF to be correct for the monitor but this didn't do it. The next thing I tried was to set the display_profile to C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\color\sRGB Color Space Profile.icm and that seems to solve all the problems. The photographs are correct as checked with Brad Carlile's site http://bradcarlile.com/blog/misc/firefox-3-to-b... and the greys remain grey on the rest of the screen.

To my uneducated mind, it looks like FF is applying the screen profile to colours that don't have their own profile (CSS and GIF) and the windows display driver is doing it again. Setting the display_profile to sRGB stops it doing that.

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Michael Campbell — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:47:34 -0000

What?!? Several dozen posts and not a single Opera-cultist bleating? Wow.

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Chris H — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 13:12:20 -0000

I think it's a good move for Firefox, certainly, but is no the solution to washed-out web photos until EVERYONE is using a color-managed browser, which won't be for several years at least. What's more important than your own photos looking good on your own flickr page on your own computer is what they look like to other people on different computers.

The solution, for now, is to convert your images to sRGB before uploading to flickr. It is a smaller gamut than AdobeRGB or whatever you happen to use in Photoshop, but that should never be noticeable (at least without a wide-gamut display as someone discussed above.)

This way, your photos should look identical on flickr and in photoshop, and more importantly, that's what absolutely everyone else will see as well (besides the fact that most won't have their monitors calibrated equally.)

If you're using Lightroom, the Export dialog will convert to sRGB for you without touching your original. It's a little more annoying in Photoshop (though there could be a better way) but is only a couple of extra clicks.

Of course, because not everyone does this, it could still be worth using the FF3 color profile option to ensure that you see other photos on flickr they way the photographer sees them.

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Ben Curtis — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:59:41 -0000

To those trying to install the Color Management plugin - if you don't want to register with the addons.mozilla.org site, just go to the author's homepage and download it from there, then open the .xpi file with FF3

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Shane Halloran — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:04:44 -0000

I've enabled the enhanced colour settings, and noticed a difference, but I wonder is the perceived difference due more to a 'placebo' effect than anything else ;-) .

Like your Flickr set!

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

chris murphy — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:20:16 -0000

While I applaud color management in FF3, I think the all or nothing approach and the default is unfortunate. I understand why full color management on was not desirable for default behavior.

But, instead of all on, or all off (default), a 3rd option should have been explored and that is to perform color management on images that have ICC profiles embedded in them. There aren't many such images on the internet, but those people who have embedded profiles have usually done so for a reason and this metadata should be honored. This is how Safari works. PNG and JPEG support ICC profiles, GIF does not. TIFF does as well but rarely used on the internet.

Case in point, I find it unfortunate that FF3 which has this capability built into it now, completely disregards embedded ICC profiles in images, so they actually display incorrectly. Example: http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter

The issue of color management on all platforms is an increasing problem. In the past, we could assume average displays had nearly sRGB like behavior, and target images and web content to that color space. Of course this is a slight problem on the Macintosh were its tone reproduction curve is defined by gamma 1.8 instead of gamma 2.2 like on other systems. But a much bigger problem than this, an one that affects all platforms, is that display technologies are diverging from sRGB rather than converging on it. We already have affordable wide-gamut displays, that once were in the $10000 range now in the $1400 range, and this will get even lower.

So it's good this functionality is in FF3. Really the primary hold out is Flash. Once that's color managed, then everything can be, without surprises.

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Sandeep — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:38:56 -0000

Turning on colour management in FF3 has most certainly improved colour vibrancy. Even Gmail looks better! Thanks for the FF3 guide and your blogs helping me to enjoy this new feature. So far I really like FF3.

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Brad — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:58:16 -0000

Great job getting Firefox3 out and I really like the color management, I wrote about it here:
http://bradcarlile.com/blog/misc/firefox-3-to-b...

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Jennifer — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:34:59 -0000

The link to that color profile addon times out, I'm afraid.

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Alltgoch — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:21:09 -0000

I don't like giving up on an issue and seem to have almost resolved the problem of CSS colours being changed in FF3. Using the Options button of the Color Management 0.3 add-on, I had originally left the "Path to color profile" box empty so it defaults to the system profile. Subsequently, I entered the path to the correct monitor profile (C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color\HP_LP2065_LCDMonitor.icm), and CSS colors rendered correctly in rc1. Today I installed rc2, which said that Color Management add-on was not compatible and would be disabled. However, it is not disabled. But, the CSS colour is a bit out again, this time my FFF7E7 background renders as FEF7E7. Odd!

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Alltgoch — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:43:42 -0000

I'm not convinced that this is the great leap forward that it should be! It's very good to have embedded colour profiles in photographs recognised, but if it is to be at the expense of changing CSS colours elsewhere on the page, that is not acceptable. As an example, I have a page with a cream background, set in the style sheet as #FFF7E7; in Firefox 3 rc1, the colour picker shows that it's being rendered as #FFEDE1, an unpleasant pinkish shade. Not good. Has anyone any answers to this?

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Andrew Brown — Mon, 26 May 2008 11:15:58 -0000

I have exactly the same yellow as nekomata. This is with RC1. It's not unpleasant, and all the other colours look fine. But it is pretty strange.

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Gary Johnson — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:03:52 -0000

Is their a FF group or other resource were I could get these kind of questions answered for the new capability?

Windows XP SP3,
I have 2 monitor profiles , the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 and one for my Viewsonic monitor?

The control panel color applet lets me associate these monitor profiles with printing and scanning devices. In 25 words or less, what happens when you do this?

If I want to print from Firefox, what happens, when FF is set up for one profile, my printers default is setup with another. Which profile is used?

What happens if I select printer properties and change it to use a different color profile than either the default set with the XP color applet or the one set in FF?

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

nekomata — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:27:43 -0000

It's pretty weird. After I activated the color profile, the whole window of firefox has became yellow. So all pages which are normally white appear in yellow.
There is just the contextual menus which are still like before (with the normal color).

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

emre — Sun, 11 May 2008 16:01:16 -0000

I wonder if the developers of Firefox have realized that this approach of setting "gfx.color_management.display_profile multiple" fails with multiple monitors? (Each monitor has its own profile.)

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Alex — Wed, 07 May 2008 04:27:01 -0000

It's easy to get colours and images to match if the browser corrects them properly and the image is setup properly.

CSS and HTML colours are defined in the sRGB colour space (and gamma), so the browser needs to draw them in that colour space (Firefox does, apart from gamma I think), Safari doesn't draw them corrected (but does correct images since it's actually using system image decoders, which do correct them)

Images are also treated in the sRGB range if they have no profile, if they have a profile they should be corrected, so it should go like this

Colours (sRGB) > Monitor (or output device) Profile
Images (sRGB or embedded) > Monitor profile

In practice it ends up more like this.

Colours (Monitor profile) > Monitor Profile
Images (Monitor, sRGB or embedded) > Monitor Profile

So we either do it fully or don't do it at all, only doing half of it (only correcting some colours/images and not others) leads to problems (Like images authored on a Mac showing up in a different shade than the background colour on a PC)

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

Florent V. — Mon, 05 May 2008 12:07:27 -0000

Thank god this isn't enabled by default! Color profile management is great for displaying photographs online (on photoblogs and Flickr and such), but it's HELL for anyone trying to create a website design mixing CSS colors and, say, PNG or JPEG. When you the very first thing you need is for colors to MATCH, you can't have you CSS colors rendered directly and your images going though some color management filter.

Color management is an issue in Safari when you use PNG (open format, supported by the W3C, only way of displaying RVBA images on a web page…). If your PNG file has some color profile information, Safari will apply that color profile to the image, and probably a default Mac color profile to everything else. So theoretically identical colors (say, #442200 and… #442200) won't match. Solution: strip any color profile information from the image (using PNGcrush for instance), and Safari will apply the same default color profile for both the CSS or JPEG colors and the PNG colors.

Of course if the image's color profile is the same as the system default, everything will look ok. But this means that an image authored in Windows or Linux will only match CSS colors in Windows or Linux, and an image authored in Mac OS X will only match CSS colors in OS X. Ouch.

For color profile management to work for webdesign (and thus for websites…), you need:
- browsers that support color profile management;
- browsers that apply a default system color profile when the image bears no color profile information (and of course they need to apply the same profile to CSS colors);
- plugins that manage color profile in the same way browsers do;
- image authoring tools that write NO color profile information for images saved for the Web.

I haven't done a survey of authoring tools yet, but it seems that most just write the system's default color profile as color profile information (if the image format supports some kind of color profile information).

So for the time being I think not enabling color profile management is the right thing to do.

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

sporniket — Mon, 05 May 2008 09:10:45 -0000

That's a very nice feature, indeed, but what happens if one has setup its system to use a color_profile on whole screen : do the cumulative color profiles lead to distort the color again ?

Re: Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)

jarek — Fri, 02 May 2008 03:03:57 -0000

The mozilla add-on site does not allow me to register. I always get the message that there are errors in the submitted form. Is there any other way to obtain this add-on?