Are Shutterbugs Getting Flocked?
The other day I was browsing the web when I saw this banner ad for the social web browser Flock
In the ad Flock is advertising its close integration with Flickr, a great tool for pro, amateur and cell phone photographers alike. No argument there. What got me a little peeved was:
…the browser designed for photographers.
In my mind any browser designed for photographers would surely include some form of colour management. Flock sadly, does not.
Now I am only going after Flock because of this ad. Most browsers are guilty of the inability to recognize ICC profiles. In fact the only major browsers capable of offering useful colour management are Safari (mac and PC), OmniWeb and the upcoming Firefox 3.
So why is colour management important? Colour management attempts to deliver the most accurate colours across different mediums and devices. When we take a picture we want the green grass to be the same(or closest possible) green on our TV, our computer, our friends’s computers and on photo paper when we print it out. ICC profiles are simply an open cross-platform implementation of colour management.
Rather than blab on I threw together these images to demonstrate why colour management is an important part of our online experience.
Click and hold the image above. If your browser supports colour management then the image will get ugly fast. If your browser doesn’t manage colour then you are already experiencing the ugly and the colour will not change.
The embedded profile above is Adobe RGB (1998). It looks terrible to the majority of the world so you should never use it on the web, but it makes for a nice demonstration.
Here you can see the clear difference in colour (for those without colour managing browsers).
If we zoom in the difference becomes even more apparent.
Hopefully colour management will be integrated into newer versions of not only Flock but every major browser. As we spend more time moving images, videos and other media onto the web consistency in colour should be a high priority.
You can read more about the International Color Consortium here.
To enable colour management in Firefox 3 beta type about:config into the address bar and change gfx.color_management.enabled to true.
*Webkit supports colour management so projects like Shiira, Fluid and iCab should work.
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