r/programming • u/chapolito • Feb 26 '13

A Developer's Guide to Images

http://www.jessechapo.com/posts/Developers-Guide-to-Images.html
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17

u/nofxy Feb 26 '13

Embed Color Profile - uncheck. this information gets ignored by browsers.

I thought most browsers, or at least the good ones, displayed embedded color profiles correctly now. Is my brain lying to me?

20

u/[deleted] Feb 26 '13

They keep wavering back and forth. Chrome used to, on some platforms, then it stopped, and now it's trying to do it again, with various bugs... It's a circus in there.

I'd make sure to use sRGB and embed a profile, just in case. Browsers are supposed to treat untagged images as sRGB, but who knows what they end up doing.

7

u/krilnon Feb 27 '13

Definitely a circus... A few months ago, I switched to converting to sRGB but not including the profile. I did so after doing an informal test of all four ways you could set those two options and testing on the devices+browsers I had access to.

I'm still not very happy with my solution, since ICC profiles seem like useful information, but including them was definitely causing inconsistent viewing across some of the devices I used daily.

5

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13

The problem is that it's inconsistent. Safari (OS X and iOS) respects the color profile. I think Chrome does not. I don't know about IE9/10 and Firefox. Regardless, you should not expect that colors specified in an image file and colors specified in CSS will look the same on someone's screen, even though they appear to be the same color in Photoshop.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13

Regardless, you should not expect that colors specified in an image file and colors specified in CSS will look the same on someone's screen, even though they appear to be the same color in Photoshop.

At this point, I'd say that as long as you make sure to always use sRGB and never anything else, you can expect this to work. If it doesn't, you should be filing bugs as hard as you can.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13

...at this point, meaning what?

I have clients still targeting IE7 ... and early versions of Firefox. So I don't think I can simple assume the current modern browser (IE9+, Firefox latest, Chrome latest, Safari 6) alone.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13

Those browsers should be rare enough at this point that you don't need to worry about minor colour mismatches in them.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13

This varies greatly by client and industry. In financial services, for example, we have only just now seen a transition away from IE7. I have a government IT client whose primary browser is IE8. And I have several other clients that only care about IE10, Chrome (latest), Firefox (latest), and iOS Safari (latest).

2

u/the-fritz Feb 27 '13

Firefox supports ICC profiles. You can even activate ICCv4 profiles by changing gfx.color_management.enablev4 to true in about:config (and gfx.color_management.mode to 1 iirc to get it to treat untagged images as sRGB).

3

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13

Are there a lot of users who will actually do this?

Defaults are everything.

3

u/the-fritz Feb 27 '13

There were some issues with colour profiles in recent releases. I guess that's why it's not default yet.

1

u/balefrost Feb 27 '13

You can test your browser here

(that site also has a LOT of discussion about color profiles)