Firefox Issue

Ok, so i'm an avid user of firefox. However, just tonight I noticed an issue with it, and I can't figure out the problem. I was uploading photos onto my account on deviant art when I noticed the pictures appeared to be really washed out from their originals. I opened up safari and looked at the pictures and they looked just fine no washed out effect. However for some reason I notice now that Firefox has a really washed out look to it which I've never noticed before. Are there any settings that I could have bumped? It's a huge difference.

Edit: Ok so I downloaded Camino as a neutral application to see which one produced the washed out look and Camino has the same look as Firefox so for some reason neither of those 2 are holding the color of the image as well as safari. I don't know what could cause this. On my computer it looks just like it does in Safari but the tones are all off in Camino and Firefox

Edit: Problem solved I guess. Apparently of all the web browsers only Safari has color management and can pick up on color profiles. So therefore it retains the color values from image editing programs. Just figured I'd leave an answer in case anyone else has noticed this but I'm sure it's a well known topic. Here is a test site: http://www.color.org/version4html.html in which you can compare the effects in 2 different browsers.

Wow cool find. Interesting.

But why would a compressed image have a color profile?

OSU, thanks for the post... I've been using Firefox (primarily because I used it before I switched)... but there seems to be a few reasons why some people use Safari.

Hi Gulf. I saw another post you made referring to web development. I suggest you not use Safari for development. It's too niche with it's own set of problems, and as this thread points out, does not render like any other browser.

Color space transformation

First, the image should be converted from RGB into a different color space called YCbCr. It has three components Y, Cb and Cr: the Y component represents the brightness of a pixel, the Cb and Cr components represent the chrominance (split into Blue and Red components). This is the same as the color space used by PAL, MAC and Digital color television transmission (but not by NTSC, which uses the similar YIQ color space). The YCbCr color space conversion allows greater compression for the same image quality (or greater image quality for the same compression).

This conversion to YCbCr is specified in the JFIF standard, and should be performed for the resulting JPEG file to have maximum compatibility. However, many "high quality" JPEG images do not apply this step and instead keep them in the sRGB color space, where each color plane is compressed and quantized separately with similar quality levels.

Click to expand...

Found this courtesy of Wikipedia. Apparently most jpegs retain the sRGB color profile unless converted over which is why you get color distortion from Browsers that do not support Color profiles.

that makes sense.. and gui, I dont use safari... I've primarily been using firefox for years now and before that (gulp) internet explorer. Yeah, I'm looking around for basic web development software (an alternative to what I've used for over 10 years now- Frontpage and more recently Microsoft Expression). I don't do it for a living... hobby only but I'm anal as heck when it comes to my site.

I think a properly exported jpg for web use would have all profiles and meta data, and anything not purely image-related, stripped out. If your jpgs are retaining all that other info, you're not optimizing them properly (or you NEED that other stuff in there).

It could be possible. I'm using Adobe Lightroom for the first time and rather than having a Save feature it uses an export feature, I guess I'll start exporting them after modifying them into photoshop and then save from there.

Hey OSU, how do you like lightroom, I downloaded the demo some time ago but never really worked with it... Just curious if it's so great as to switch from using what comes with elements.

Lightroom is a really really great photo editing program. I never used elements that much (mainly photoshop) so I can't really compare. The interface is what really sold me. It's set up very nicely with all your tools for editing laid out very nicely. You get all of your color tone overlays down the left (sepia, warming filters, coolling filters, etc) with a thumbnail preview over that window of how it will change the look of your image. On the right side you get your histogram, all of your color/shadow/hue/sharpening/noise editing in it's own window nicely grouped together. Across the bottom you have your library of imported photos. And in the upper middle you have the current photo you are working on with some options directly under it such as (redeye, spot removal, healing tool, cropper). I think it's an excellent program and it will probably be my main photo editing tool.