on May 15th, 2007Embedded Color Profiles
I could also title this post “Why Macs are Smarter than Other Computers” but I am not going to. The problem I came across is that I was exporting my finished photographs with embedded color profiles calibrated for my work flow. This means that the information I have given to my computer about how it displays colors is taken into account when creating the output image. I knew in the back of my head somewhere that I should have been more diligent but because I was exporting using sRGB I thought I would be okay. Aperture, and perhaps it shouldn’t do this, tweaks the embedded color profile to make sure that the image that gets to you looks the same as the image I created. My Mac recognizes and compensates for the profile; all of my previews look fantastic. Safari, a Mac Web Browser, respects embedded color profiles. This means that when an image has an embedded color profile it uses that color profile. My favorite browser for most of my Internet work, Firefox, however does not respect embedded color profiles. Firefox knows that the most pictures on the Internet use sRGB color profile and therefore Firefox renders ALL images in generic sRGB color space. PCs have this same problem with Internet Explorer and Firefox for windows both ignoring embedded color profiles.
I don’t know if I would say that Macs and Apple software are smarter, but they are much more helpful for my photography. For example if I wish to view my RAW files that I photograph with on a family member’s Windows XP computer (true story) I have to install my camera manufactures RAW program. If I want to view a RAW file in OS X I just open it up. Macs recognize most RAW files system wide in all Apple programs and when a new camera with a new RAW format comes out Apple soon releases an update to support that format also (a system wide update and not just a program update). There is a downside to the Safari web browser though and that is that it does not assume that a picture with out an embedded color profile exists in sRGB color space. This means that an sRGB image may appear incorrectly in Safari but the upside is that many other forms of web information, like Macromedia’s Flash, that don’t support color profiles will appear consistent in Safari when it would not otherwise.
Shortly after discovering my color profile mistake I changed my preferences in Aperture and reexported my blog photographs. If you go back and look at the last two weeks photographs you will notice that the colors are generally more vibrate and more saturated. I used The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program: an open source alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop) to compare side by side the differences between the way the embedded color profile photographs looked and the way the new updated ones look. I was able to do this because unlike most native Apple products the GIMP also does not honor Aperture’s embedded color profiles. On the left is the old photograph and on the right is the new version.
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