Colour Management in Firefox

[ravells]

I came across this post on another forum:

#1 Type about:config in Firefox 3's address bar and press Return. The configuration settings will appear.

#2 In the Filter field, type gfx. The list of settings will shorten to show just those related to graphics, ie gfx.

#3 If the Value for gfx.color_management.enabled is False, double-click anywhere on that line to toggle the setting to True.

#4 Quit and relaunch Firefox 3 and you're in business. You can confirm that colour management is working by viewing the photos on this page. If all four quadrants of the first photo are a seamless match, then colour management in your copy of Firefox is up and running.

Not being anything approaching technically minded, I thought I'd post it here as it might have some relevance to us in terms of colour matching - but I would be grateful if someone more technical than myself could explain what the advantages are.

As a side note, the brown frame around my avatar is invisible on my computer at home (running Firefox) but is a slightly different shade from the brown background on my computer at work (running ie 7) - I simply cannot understand why this should be the case - but gave up worrying about it a long time ago!

[NeonKnight]

Ok, So I get the bottom image of the photo (Green Sky Upper Right and Lower Left), but damn if I can figure out what to do to fix it

[Redrobes]

It can make a huge difference but you will see it the most when printing stuff. Most apps dont take heed of colour correction data in files. The one that I know does is the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. I would imagine that Acrobat does also given that most print shops will do a proof in PDF.

I dont think any app I know embeds color calibration into the files. Maybe photoshop would and I have some tools to do it but generally you just get RGB data. Really, the graphics card should be doing the color correction for the video card + monitor all at once but that corrects only for the display device not the image.

I would say this though. Its a bit of a tech minefield the last time I looked into it.

With my Firefox 2 I get the same as Neon - the bad version. If I use Picture and Fax viewer then I get the ICC2 ok but not 4. Using Acrobat I get them all - as you might expect from an Adobe program. I guess FF V3 will do all of them too now.

[ravells]

But what is it doing? Can you explain it in plain English? I don't even understand the problem it's trying to correct!

as you can see I'm VERY thick when it comes to these things!

[Robbie]

Color Correction is a complex thing indeed. Its best used when you do a lot of printing...if your monitor and printer are not calibrated then what you see on screen will not be what you see on print. ICC profiles are used to make the two match I believe.

NOW...I know this is a neato cool factor thing that is great at first...BUT...I tend to hang out at 4chan (the dark deep cess pool at the end of the interwebz) and they have an HR board that occasionally has some good HR stuff if you can get past all the perverted stuff...and turning on ICC color correction will slow down the display of high resolution images a LOT...especilaly if yo uopen multiple HR images in multiple tabs...

So if you don't plan on printing images FROM your web browser and you like HR images, I'd recommend against this setting. Otherwise its cool.

[Sigurd]

The realness or correctness of colours is usually expressed in terms of warmth and shade. How much yellow in green etc....

The principle is that you start with a value (a subjective choice) and display that value on hardware that creates a new set of variations. Colour correction is usually centered around Monitors and Printing. Light behaves differently from pigment and differently from toner.

Different rendering engines can treat colour differently too (eg your IE example) Each of these differences can modify your colour.

Of course you may see colour differently than I do too. (Even spell it wrong )

Most graphics cards have a colour correcting function. ATI has one attached to its properties icon. Adobe has a colour correction routine too (I"ve forgotten where it is). I set mine once for the use of a medium, say the monitor, and forget it. If I were to publish a picture I'd review it for each project, especially with each change of printer\printhouse.

The thing is that because it's mostly an interpretation of base values and (with the exception of editors like CS2) you don't really influence those values - its sort of a wash. If your screen is set up to display reasonable colour the Firefox settings aren't really important. The only issue might be that if my colour settings were wildly different from the average, my creations would seem off on everybody elses computer because they were designed to look good for me.


IMHO Firefox is being considerate\'far sighted' with these settings but they probably aren't that important. Alot of interest is payed to how a browser renders a page. Comparisons are made and colour correctness might be a point of comparison.

Best thing is to set up your monitor and graphics card correctly than assume you're close to normal. "... gave up worrying about it a long time ago!"


Sigurd

Of course anyone with critical uses for these is free to pipe up.

[jfrazierjr]

Of course you may see colour differently than I do too. (Even spell it wrong )

Yes, and thank you for providing the example of how to spell it wrong.

Joe

[ravells]

OK, so it sounds like I don't need to worry about it, which is the important thing!