{"id":469,"date":"2007-05-25T21:08:43","date_gmt":"2007-05-25T12:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-05-25\/469"},"modified":"2007-05-25T21:08:43","modified_gmt":"2007-05-25T12:08:43","slug":"update-on-color-spaces-windows-is-color-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-05-25\/469","title":{"rendered":"Update on Color Spaces: Windows is Color Stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n

It's been just over six months since I released<\/a> my long writeup\non digital\nimage color spaces<\/a>, and it seems to have been very well received. I appreciate<\/span> all the wonderful feedback I've gotten about it.<\/p>\n\n

However, I've recently realized that it contained a relatively<\/span> big\nmistake. I've corrected it now, but in the original version, I repeated<\/span> the\n“conventional wisdom” that most applications on Windows blindly treated color\ndata as being sRGB color data. I called<\/span> these applications “Color\nStubborn<\/a>.”<\/p>\n\n

However, it seems that was wrong. Today I tested<\/span> IE6, Firefox, and the popular IrfanView<\/a> image viewer and found that\nthey were “Color Stupid<\/a>” in that they performed no color management at all.<\/p>\n\n

This is depressing in every respect. It's depressing<\/span> that this sad state\nof affairs exists, and it's even more depressing and embarrassing for me\nthat I didn't<\/span> test this for myself much earlier (such as, for example,\nbefore<\/b> I published<\/span> the writeup).<\/p>\n\n

I should have fixed this error sooner. I was alerted<\/span> to the issue two\nmonths ago when Matt Thomas<\/a> left a\ncomment<\/a>\ntelling that his experience was that Windows browsers and applications were\nColor Stupid. It raised<\/span> my eyebrows at the time because I had<\/span> taken the\nconventional wisdom at face value and had never thought to question it.\nUnfortunately, I was<\/span> really\nbusy<\/a> at the time and neglected to follow up on it, and then it slipped my mind.<\/p>\n\n

Someone brought\nup the issue<\/a> in a forum<\/span> at Digital Photography Review today, which\nprompted me to do some tests on my Windows\nXP<\/a> system. I know that<\/span> Photoshop is properly color managed, so I viewed<\/span>\nthe colorful petunias<\/a>\nof yesterday's post in Photoshop and very carefully compared it to what I\nsaw<\/span> in IE6, Firefox, and IrfanView, and found the Photoshop rendition to be\nsubtly but perceptibly different.\n\n<\/p>

\n\nI then used Photoshop's soft-proofing function to view the sRGB image\nwithout monitor color management (that is, just letting the monitor deal\nwith the sRGB data directly instead of converting to the monitor's color\nspace first), and then saw exactly what I saw<\/span> in the other\napplications.<\/p>\n\n

I've updated the color-space writeup, but really, this is an\nunforgivable and horribly embarrassing error on my part. I hope no<\/span> one ever\nfinds out about it....<\/p>\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It's been just over six months since I released my long writeup on digital image color spaces, and it seems to have been very well received. I appreciate all the wonderful feedback I've gotten about it.<\/p>

However, I've recently realized that it contained a relatively big mistake. I've corrected it now, but in the original version, I repeated the \"conventional wisdom\" that most applications on Windows blindly treated color data as being sRGB color data. I called these applications \"Color Stubborn.\"<\/p>

However, it seems that was wrong. Today I tested IE6, Firefox, and the popular IrfanView image viewer and found [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}