When using wide gamut monitors

[obelix]

Dell 2408 was driving me nuts. Even after calibration, the reds and greens were nuclear in Safari.

I read this:

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/645679/999999

Basically other than color aware apps and Firefox 3, other apps on a wide gamut monitor suck

I don't know if this is good or bad news.

FF3 works amazing. In safari, people go crazily red. I guess this settles my browser issues .
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anand

10mm and be there

Gallery http://www.anands.net
Blog http://blog.anands.net

[starchild]

Thanks for the info, Anand. How do you like your wide-gamut monitor? Now you can see colors that us earthlings cannot quite see

One problem with wide-gamut is that to take advantage of it, you need to post-process your photos in a non-sRGB color space, and save the results there. I always save jpgs, and discard raw. Is 8 bit enough to capture, say, adobe RGB jpgs?

To share photos, you'll need to convert them back to sRGB. That also sounds like quite a bit of extra effort.

In sRGB, I'm missing subtle shades of red and purple visible to human eye. Don't know if others are feeling the same.

Thanks!
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Practice, not purchase

[obelix]

Ever since I am using LR, I have been using ProPhotoRGB which is a bigger gamut than AdobeRGB. For certain PS work, I work on 16 bit, but I usually am self contained in LR these days. Of course when saving for web, I have to export to sRGB, can't avoid that.

W.r.to colors, yeah, in a non color managed browser vs color managed app, the difference is night and day. I am seeing hues of red and green that are mashed up in the lesser browser as a big over saturated blurb.

I can only imagine how a nice backlit LED monitor would behave.

[karlg]

Since getting my HP3065, pictures of California Poppies actually show the correct orange color, at least when I shot RAW. I assume that they would also display correctly if I had shot aRGB JPEG, since they still display correctly after conversion.

It's an unfortunate fact of life that as you get more into proper color management and wider gamut monitors, the greater the difference between what you see and what people using un-color-managed apps with un-profiled, everyday monitors will see. Several months ago I posted a thread that pointed out that comments in the C&S section about colors and tones were meaningless unless the picture contained a profile and the critique-er was using a color managed browser, such as Safari (on a profiled monitor).

BTW: is color management on by default in Firefox 3? I seem to remember something about having to turn on a hidden switch in Firefox to get color management, but that may have been for FF2.
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Karl
pix @ www.pbase.com/karlg

[kalieaire]

Default is off.

How to turn it on:

1) go type in your address bar "about:config"
2) type "gfx" for your search string
3) change the value of gfx.color_management.enabled from false to true by double clicking.
4) enjoi

Alternatively, if you want a GUI interface to turn it on:

1) Tools
2) "Add-ons"
3) Click on the "Get Add-ons" button
4) Search for "Color Management" - Install and restart FireFox
5) Tools, "Add-ons", Color Management, Options
6) Select your display profile (should be located in c:\windows\system32\spool\drivers\color if you have a PC)
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stan

[obelix]

Stan said it, in the former way, you should see something like this:



Karl

While Safari handles color profiles correctly for non wide gamut monitors, it defaults to sRGB for wide gamut monitors. Colors are terrible on safari. Even simple things like yahoo's logo or ebay's logo are a big mushy saturated red for me. Only FF3 shows them accurately.

We need lots of software upgrades to catch up with these monitors, I wonder if that will happen when the world is going to be flooded with 6 bit TN panels.
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anand

10mm and be there

Gallery http://www.anands.net
Blog http://blog.anands.net

[obelix]

[karlg]

Stan and Anand: thanks for the info.

Anand: when you said "Safari defaults to sRGB" did you mean:
1. Safari doesn't pick up the profile you have set for your monitor and instead converts colors to sRGB on output, or
2. Safari ignores the profile contained in an image file and assumes it is sRGB, or
3. something else?
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Karl
pix @ www.pbase.com/karlg

[obelix]

Karl

This is from that FredMiranda thread:

[kalieaire]

[obelix]

[karlg]

Thanks for info. So with Safari, if an image specifies a color space, then Safari maps the RGB values from that space to your display's space, but if an image doesn't specify a color space, instead of assuming sRGB and mapping from that to your display's space, it just sends the RGB values from the image directly to your display (i.e., it does what non-color managed browsers do with all images). It isn't doing anything different for wide gamut display versus non-wide-gamut displays, it's just that with a wide gamut display you need the browser to map images that are in relatively small color spaces (such a sRGB) to your display's space to keep them from looking over-saturated.

[obelix]

I see - I learnt a lot more from your post than anything else I have read so far .

Thanks.

Yeah, so would it help if we embedded sRGB profile to every photo we see in Safari? Would that fix it?

[karlg]

[obelix]

Thanks again, Karl. That was very helpful.

Now, I took the standard yahoo image http://l.yimg.com/a/i/ww/beta/y3.gif.

I converted it to RGB color mode [it is defaulted to 'indexed color' and that gave me grief ].

I saved it as JPG with sRGB profile embedded. I opened the JPG in Safari, PS, Firefox and LR - voila, it looks the same.

So basically, even with a semi-color managed browser like Safari, to show a sRGB image in the wide gamut space, the sRGB profile must be embedded.

Thanks again.

PS: In the indexed mode, Firefox behaved weird with the color profile embedded. Safari did the right thing .
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anand

10mm and be there

Gallery http://www.anands.net
Blog http://blog.anands.net