Monday, February 6, 2012

Be Sure To Import Your Photos as ProPhoto RGB, but Export as sRGB

I have a MAC at home and a PC at work. I often switch between Firefox and Chrome and I noticed one disturbing thing when I was viewing photos in Chrome: Some photos that I saw from certain photographers were sort of dull and lifeless, but only in Chrome. Conversely, in Firefox, they were bursting with color. I noticed that in the Flickr EXIF data the Color Space for these photos would say "Uncalibrated". It turns out that Chrome doesn't supported embedded color profiles - sort of the legend for how the browser should interpret the extended color set.

There's an easy quick fix for this: All you have to do is to tell Photoshop to force all colors to sRGB. You can see a video on how to do this here: 
3/14/2012 Update: 
It turns out that while sRGB is the preferred profile for viewing an image on ALL web browsers safely, it is NOT optimal for your working color space. See this page: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/prophoto-rgb.shtml/ Basically, the ProPhotoRGB setting that Adobe Lightroom uses by default is the best choice as it has the highest color range. Using sRGB during your workflow may clip some colors where ProPhoto would not. 

Thus, I think the best mode to be in is to bring your photos into Photoshop and work in ProPhoto, but finally export them in sRGB (see here for how to do this in LR and PS: http://om4.com.au/client/preparing-images-color-profiles-srgb-adobe-rgb/) so that you can be assured that they display on ALL web browsers safely. 

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