{"id":384,"date":"2007-02-17T16:43:03","date_gmt":"2007-02-17T07:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-02-17\/384"},"modified":"2007-06-30T19:50:42","modified_gmt":"2007-06-30T10:50:42","slug":"more-on-digital-color-spaces-a-reply-to-chris-macaskill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-02-17\/384","title":{"rendered":"More on Digital Color Spaces: a Reply to Chris MacAskill"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n

\n\nAfter publishing my writeup on Digital Image\nColor Spaces<\/a> four months ago, I got into<\/span> a discussion\non color spaces and photo-hosting sites<\/a> with one Chris MacAskill<\/i>\non a forum<\/span> at Digital Photograph Review. I didn't<\/span> realize it until today,\nbut it turns out that this Chris MacAskill guy is the president of the\npopular SmugMug<\/a> photo-hosting site.<\/p>\n\n

Fast-forward a few months to earlier this week, and Chris posted his\nown comments<\/a> on the Mac\/OSX aspects of the issue. In just a<\/span> few days,\nhis post got over 100 comments, including some from the main players in\nthis arena. I guess<\/span> that's one benefit of, well, having your own popular\nphoto-hosting site. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n

Chris left\na comment<\/span><\/a> on my color-space writeup pointing to his post, and as my\nresponse to him and his writeup got longer, I decided<\/span> to just include it\nhere in my blog as a post.<\/span>....<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\nChris MacAskill wrote:\n
\n|> I'd love it if together we could get some momentum for\n|> Apple to implement the easy fix that makes this right.\n<\/pre>\n\n
Wow, Chris, well, if it's momentum you wanted, I think<\/span> you got it,\nconsidering that you got more comments on your post than I have<\/span> pageviews\non mine, I guess<\/span> there's some benefit to being the head of a popular<\/span> site\nlike yours. \ud83d\ude42\n\n<\/p>
\n\nI see that even Dave Hyatt responded to your note, which is excellent. I wrote<\/span> to him directly myself, but got no reply. He's someone<\/span> who can\nactually do something at Apple.\n\n<\/p>
\n\n\nOne thing I got from the article and from the comments is that people seem\nto think that setting the monitor profile is a good<\/span> way to address this\nsituation. However, that's trying to cancel out one mistake with another.\n\n<\/p>
\n\n\nThe monitor profile is data that indicates how to convert\ndevice-independent color data into actual photons, and that data is\nnecessarily dependent on the physical characteristics of the individual LCD\nor CRT. sRGB was designed to mimic the average such device (circa 10 years\nago), but it would be a remarkable<\/span> coincidence for any particular<\/i>\ndisplay's physical characteristics to actually match sRGB, so setting its profile\nto sRGB is correct only in a remarkablely<\/span> coincidental situation.\n\n\n<\/p>
\n\n\nThe root of the OSX problem is that it makes a poor<\/span> guess as to the color\nspace of an unprofiled image, and so given that, how can it possibly hope\nto convert properly from the (misunderstood) device-independent color data\nof the image to the device-dependent data required of the display device? You can try<\/span> to compensate by changing the monitor profile to something less\naccurate that seems to give nice results, but you can probably get the same\neffect by smearing an appropriately colored block of Jello™ in your\neyes. Both seem effective in the short run, but are probably not good\nsolutions. \ud83d\ude42\n\n<\/p>
\n\n\nThe consensus among the comments on your post seems to be that the\nparamount importance is for colors to match across technologies.... images,\nflash, html\/css, etc., and that such matching should take precedence over\naccurate color rendering. Clearly, the matching is important because, as\nyou point out in your post's examples, not doing so can create a worse<\/span>\neffect than coordinated-but-inaccurate colors.\n\n\n<\/p>
\n\n\nHowever, what no one seems to mention is that the need for coordination\ntends to be restricted to, well, when it's needed, and that there are times\nwhen proper colors are clearly more important, such as when displaying the\nrich beauty of one's photographic work (such as on a web<\/span> page with a\ncolorless<\/span> background, like your\nphoto-hosting site<\/a> does.)\n\n<\/p>
\n\n\nI don't doubt the difficulty faced by Dave Hyatt at Apple, but here's a\nsuggestion<\/span> I've made before for OSX that goes a long<\/span> way toward solving the\nissues in a way<\/span> that is sensitive to the context: respect an image's\ncolor-space information if it's there, and if not, coordinate the color\nspace with that of flash\/css\/whatever.<\/b>\n\n<\/p>
\n\n\nThis might sound to be exactly like what OSX does now, but the big\ndifference is that OSX currently ignores tagged<\/i> color profiles. All digital<\/span> cameras today (well, at least any I've ever heard of) mark the\ncolor space in the image metadata with a simple<\/span> one-word note, rather than\nwith a full<\/span>-blown embedded color profile. The EXIF\/DCF standards that\ncameras tend to adhere to currently allow sRGB and AdobeRGB to be noted\nthis way. The benefit<\/span> is that it takes only a few<\/span> bytes, but the drawback\nis that no browser recognizes it, not even Safari.\n\n<\/p>
\n\nMay 2007 Update<\/b> Much to my embarrassment, I've only just realized\nthat Windows browsers do not default to sRGB, but rather, are unmanaged,\nand so they treat all images in the same\nsort-of-random, sort-of-close-to-sRGB way that Safari treats unprofiled images.\nAs such, the next paragraph is wrong.<\/i>\n\n<\/p>
\n\n(Outside of OSX, it's not usually an issue because most cameras produce\nonly sRGB, and most browsers are on Windows which blindly assumes sRGB, and\nhence it becomes an issue mostly for Safari and other OSX browsers).<\/strike>\n\n<\/p>
\n\n\nThe beauty of this approach is that it keeps color coordination among page\ncomponents when needed (because web designers making mastheads and logos\nand stuff don't tag their images with color-space information), yet allows\npeople who upload images from their point-n-shoot or pro-dSLR to expect\nthem to be seen with the most accurate colors their audience's monitors can\nproduce. It would<\/span> even let SmugMug have color-managed thumbnails!\n\n<\/p>
\n\nOne would hope that in the future, Flash and such will all be properly\ncolor managed (and no one is waiting for this more than Dave, I'm sure\n\ud83d\ude42<\/b>), but until then, doesn't this seem like a reasonable<\/span>\ncompromise? You can then<\/span> get proper colors where it matters most, and\npeople can leave their monitors set with the profile that's most\nappropriate for the monitor<\/i> and not to an artificial profile\ndesigned to cater to some specific misinterpreted content.\n\n<\/p>
\n\nThe next step, then, would get the folks in Redmond to respect color\nprofiles.....but I won't<\/span> be holding my breath!\n\n<\/p>\nxref<\/a>\n<\/div>\n\n
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My Tech-Related Photography Posts<\/b><\/p>\n