Wide Gamut Monitors - A Warning

[Bob Andersson]

Hi folks,

I invested in a wide gamut monitor last year, with which I am delighted. The snag came when I discovered that images edited in Photoshop and "Saved for the Web", while displaying correctly when viewed via the Firefox browser, were over-saturated when viewed using Internet Explorer or via the Windows 7 screensaver. Then I discovered that if I opened a JPEG using IrfanView, which did correctly display the colour, and then saved said JPEG the newly saved JPEG displayed identically, and correctly, on both Firefox and Internet Explorer on my monitor.

Problem solved, I thought. Wrong!!!

It turns out that those IrfanView saved images were now displaying with under-saturated colours on regular sRGB monitors.

The moral of the story is that if you have a wide gamut monitor then you have to accept that you will not see correctly colour balanced images from the web if you use Internet Explorer. Note that this is a different issue from whether or not your browser takes note of the colour profile, typically sRGB or AdobeRGB, embedded in a JPEG. More recent versions of IE do read and act upon that profile but don't, it would seem, take account of the ICC profile for your monitor and instead assume, in a rather brain dead way, that all monitors stick to the sRGB standard. Doh!

Bob.

P.S. I've re-uploaded all my most recent astro-photos so you might find them a little more colourful than before. Unfortunately those posted in the Twitter-sphere can't be so changed.

[Gordon Laing]

Bob, were your previous images saved with Adobe RGB or sRGB? If the former, then yes you'll have problems on lesser monitors.

[Bob Andersson]

Hi Gordon,

Although I edit using the AdobeRGB space that always gets mapped to sRGB by Photoshop when I "Save for the Web" and that sRGB profile is embedded in the JPEG.

There is an awful lot of old information out there on the Net about colour management. For a long time this concentrated on most browser's lacking any ability to read and use the embedded profile (usually AdobeRGB or sRGB) in a JPEG. That was as far as the analysis went and possibly needed to go in those days when wide gamut monitors were less common outside professional establishments. The best analysis I can point to at the moment is Web browser color management by Simon Tindemans. The full article is well worth a read (it includes details on browser settings) but here are the bullet points:

Conceptually, color management in a web browser context consists of two stages: interpretation and output mapping. The interpretation stage is concerned with taking the color information on a web page (typically in the form of RGB triplets) and interpreting them in terms of a color space. This associates an intended visual response with the RGB numbers. Then, in the second stage, these colors are converted back to (different) RGB triplets [and] sent to the monitor

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer should not be used for color critical work. Although it understands both ICCv2 and ICCv4 profiles, it does not use the monitor profile, which means you cannot rely on what you're seeing. IE9 may be passable only if you have reason to believe that the native response of your monitor is close to sRGB. Otherwise, avoid.

Firefox

Firefox is currently the best choice for color managed browsing. It provides good out-of-the-box support for ICCv2 images and the monitor profile. Support for ICCv2 LUT and ICCv4 profiles and the default assignment of sRGB profiles can be enabled through a user preference (see instructions below).

I've highlighted in red the critical issue. If you have a monitor which closely approximates the sRGB colour space, or is set to do so, then IE is OK. But if you have a wide gamut monitor then not only is IE best avoided but you also have to suffer over-saturated colours on programs such as Outlook (2003 in my case) which use the IE engine to display HTML and also on the Windows screensaver.

The bottom line is that while Windows provides information about a monitor's colour profile to those applications that request it native Microsoft applications are very patchy in their use of that monitor profile. Exceptions appear to be Windows Live Photo Gallery, Microsoft Office Picture Manager and Windows Photo Viewer but Windows Paint suffers the same problem as Internet Explorer 10. Unbelievable, but true!

Bob.

P.S. For the record, I use Firefox with gfx.color_management.display_profile left blank (uses the default monitor colour profile, in my case the one set when I calibrated the monitor - I have a single monitor setup), gfx.color_management.enablev4 set to True and gfx.color_management.mode set to 1 which tells Firefox to assume that images without an embedded profile should be treated as though they are sRGB. Works well for me.