How can I ensure proper color rendition with browsers on wide gamut displays?

Question

When editing for the web, everyone will recommend you to use sRGB, since a lot of browsers don't offer color management, and most browsers will interpret all images as being sRGB anyway.

This is correct for browsers used on normal gamut displays, which live in sRGB themselves.

Now enter wide gamut displays. These live in AdobeRGB color space, and to my dismay on a wide gamut display browsers without color management will interpret image data as being in AdobeRGB color space, too. What happens if sRGB image data is interpreted as AdobeRGB? The colors are off, too strong, it looks gaudy.

The problem even continues when using a browser with colormanagement like FireFox, but viewing pictures without embedded profile: the pictures will be interpreted as AdobeRGB instead of sRGB.

In short: since I got my wide gamut display flickr looks awful.

Any ideas how I get my browsers (Internet Explorer and FireFox) to use sRGB instead of AdobeRGB for color rendition as default?

I'm using Windows 7.

Funny thing, when I download the images to the local drive and use a file viewer to view them, the color is correctly interpreted as sRGB.

Answer

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do that is practical. To get what you want, you have to set your system profile to sRGB.

The behavior of image color rendition for images with no attached profiles is undefined. Browsers don't guess what color space an image is in, if no profile is attached. The operating system handles that.

The proper way to get color rendition correctly, is to attach a profile to the image. Obviously flickr (and smugmug thumbnails) do not give you this option.

So you have two choices: one, set windows to use sRGB as your monitor profile; then all non-tagged images will look like sRGB, but tagged images will look like crap, and your color management will be wack.

Or, just deal with the fact that unmanaged images are the devil and there is nothing you can do about it.

Perhaps there is a firefox plugin that can auto attach a color profile, but outside of that, it's just a plain old suck that is known as color management.

I've had to deal with this same issue with Smugmug. My images all have attached sRGB profiles, so they look great (in color managed browsers), but thumbnails looks oversaturated. It's because the thumbs are autogenerated, and smugmug refuses to attach a color profile to them, because it doubles the size of the thumbnail. So the thumbs render in whatever the way the OS decides to render them.

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