Thanks,

Stefan (UK)

The reason I’m interested in learning more about CM is my notebook screen. I have a Dell Studio XPS notebook with a wide gamut RGB LED screen. I decided to buy this (quite expensive) screen because of the great reviews I read about it. And it is a great screen, the high resolution and brightness are just stunning. But it didn’t take long for me to notice that some colors look horribly wrong (over saturated). e.g. the reds look almost pink. It’s easy to understand that this is very annoying when watching movies, browsing, using Office, etc. And of course when editing photo’s.

I now know the reason for this and I’m trying to find the best possible solution for the problem. That’s why I’d like to ask your thoughts on some things.

I found a forum about the exact screen and this has already been of great help to me. Lots of people there have used calibration hardware to create profiles for the screen and since I’m not planning on buying such hardware and don’t know anyone to borrow it from, I’m going to assume those profiles are good enough for my screen as well.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=382939&highlight=studio+xps+16+color+profile

The biggest difficulty I’m facing now is the fact that some of my applications are color managed but most are not. I’ve come up with two possible ways to make my display look as correct as I possibly can:

I could ignore every word said about color management and just calibrate my display to look like an sRGB. This is a great solution for applications that are not color managed but how will this affect CM applications? (i.e. will photoshop display correct images when my monitor is configured in such a way that unmanaged applications look OK?) This isn’t a good solution of course because why would I buy a wide gamut display then.

A lot better would be to use as much CM applications as possible and use a correct monitor profile which I’m sure I’ll find at the forum mentioned above. But this leaves all my unmanaged applications looking horrible. Is there any way to make at least those where color is important (all kinds of Windows previews, thumbnails and photo viewers, movie editing software, media players, paint and office) look somewhat correct with the correct monitor profile in place for those that are CM?

There might be a third possibility. If one were to set the graphics cards settings in such a way that the screen looks like sRGB and then do a calibration that would consider those settings as default and create a profile to convert from data in those settings to data in wideRGB to be displayed correctly on the screen. Could it be possible to kind of ‘get the best of both worlds’ in such a way or would this just totally mess up the CM applications? Some people on the forum have spoken of this as well but I don’t think it has been tried yet. I’d just like to know your thoughts.

To conclude I’d like to add this list of software that I use. It would be great if you could tell me which ones are CM and if you know any color managed alternatives to the ones that are not.
Windows desktop (I know this isn’t CM and I can live with that)
Windows preview
Windows Photo Viewer
Windows Live Photo Gallery
Windows Live Movie Maker
Camtasia Studio and Fraps (Or any other editing and recording software)
Irfanview (is CM)
Photoshop (is CM. I don’t use it very often.)
Windows Media Player (I’ve seen that there is a way to make the classic player somewhat CM)
Power DVD (Or any other software of this kind. I know no media player is CM but I’d like to find a solution to properly watch movies. It’s annoying when people’s faces are ‘red’! Probably the only way to fix this is to temporarily adjust the display to look somewhat like sRGB)
Windows Media Center (Only use this to watch live TV via an antenna. The same applies here as with Power DVD)
Games (The same applies here again I suppose.)
Adobe Reader (I think it is CM.)
Paint
Office 2007 and possible 2010 in the future
Internet browsers (I use Firefox 3.5 which I know is CM but I’d like to know some alternatives.)
Webcam software (I have a program from Dell that is probably not CM. A program that adds a color profile to the pictures would be nice.)
Viewing a webcam stream in Messaging programs like Live Messenger or Skype (Not really that important but it would be nice to know.)
Flash player (i.e. Are Youtube video’s displayed in my browser correctly? I think the progress bar is not, it looks pinkish too.)

Sorry this post has gotten so long but I’m just trying to be complete. I know I’m not the only one having this problem so hopefully this can be of use for others too. Thanks in advance.

Greetings,
Jeroen

I would guess that your third idea would not work, because even though you calibrate it after you make the hardware changes, the hardware changes have left it so that it can’t generate colors outside sRGB, so a CM application won’t be able to drive any other colors. Microsoft is notorious for completely ignoring color management, so I’m not sure there’s much you can do until they get a clue, other than not use their products or put up with it. non-IE browsers are often color managed these days, at least to some extent. Check out Safari and perhaps Chrome. Last I checked Irfanview wasn’t color managed… maybe it is now? —Jeffrey

Last I checked in on Safari, it treats images without embedded profiles in the same way flash does, for exactly this reasons, so strip any color-profile info from the image and it should be fine. This Safari design decision work out great for you, but it would make so much more sense for them to recognize embedded “this is sRGB” notations as well….. then you’d still get your win, and out-of-camera JPGs would be displayed better as well. —Jeffrey

Rene Damkot,
I agree with what you said about FF3.0 and FF3.5 , as I tested and concluded the same and I
request Jeffrey to look in to it ,and update the same in the main article.

The main issue is about FF3.0 ,when it is CMS enabled it is smart type not foolish type.

The second issue is FF3.5 by default is foolish type (mode 2), What a pity! they should make it smart type ( mode 1) out of the box.

Do others agree with my view ?

Firefox 3.0 is not color managed by default (Color Stupid) and fully colormanaged when set to. (Color Smart, not Color Foolish)
FF 3.5 is Color Foolish by default, and can be set to either get Color Stupid or Color smart.

As far as I know, the “convert to sRGB” option in the “Save for Web” dialog box was introduced in PSCS3, not CS4.

To convert to “local” the software can easily determine what TZ is currently set on the computer being used. Conversion from UTC to a local time is easy in this way and is the safest and most consistent thing to do. Having to change your camera every time you switch timezones would be a minor nightmare for travelers, as it’s one more thing to remember to fix when you get to your destination. Just put the camera in UTC and software should be able to figure it out.

However, I know Lightroom 1 had a nasty habit of interpreting the time in the metadata as being in the currently set TZ on the computer being used, so setting your camera to UTC nearly always resulted in bad dates. The best thing to do for Lightroom is to set your camera to your local TZ and never ever change the TZ on your computer while importing photos. A pain, but the only thing that “works”.

I completely agree that the TZ should be encoded in the metadata, because without it the software has to make an assumption, and we know where that leads.

Nice.
Learned something again

I found your article on stumbleupon, I really love it. However, even if it is 2 years 2 months old, people are still seeing it, and it’d be nice if you updated this with the fact that Firefox 3 is a Color Smart application by option, and 3.1 is looking like it’s gonna be set for Color Smart by default. And as I’m sure you know, Firefox is available on Mac, Windows, and Linux.