Safari Color Management

An interesting problem indeed. It sort of emphasizes the lack of color management on the WEB.

The commonly recommended workaround, to calibrate all monitors to something close to sRGB is suddenly outdated when monitors can display a gamut outside of the sRGB range.

To clarify your problem a bit.
Safari uses the monitor color space as working space, always. This is not necessarily a problem, as long as images gets converted into the monitor color space when they are opened. However, this does not happen when the image does not have a color profile. Correct but inconvenient.

In Photoshop you can choose the working space. Best is if the working space is the same as the target space. Thus, if you work with WEB publishing choose sRGB. If you work with printing choose your printers color space etc.

But Photoshop will also have a problem if images does not have a color profile, unless the image has an EXIF tag, indicating that the image is in for instance sRGB color space. Photoshop is intelligent enough to understand this, because most digital cameras produce images without color profile but with the EXIF color space tag. In case there is no color profile, and no EXIF color space tag, Photoshop will, depending on your color preference settings, ask you to assign a colorspace or automatically assign working space, which could be whatever.

There are possible solutions to your problem.
1. If you publish WEB sites and want to browse them correctly, using your very expensive monitor without lobotomizing it's capabilities. Use Safari or other color managed browser and follow the two rules of image publishing for the WEB

Rule 1) Images on the web should be published in sRGB color space (otherwise they will not be displayed correctly in browsers on the MS-Windows platforms, with the exception of Safari, viewing images with a color profile)

Rule 2) Images should have a color profile, in particular the sRGB images (otherwise they will not be displayed correctly on the MacOS platforms. Maybe close to correct if you have calibrated your monitor to PC-gamma)

For a test, go to http://www.gballard.net/psd/golive_pageprofile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html

2) If you want to browse WEB sites, created by people who did not follow the second rule, that is most WEB-sites, and by the way, includes parts of the Apple WEB site.

Do the following: In Safari, Safari Menu/Report Bugs to Apple - include the following statement.

Dear Safari development team. Most WEB sites on the internet does not display properly in Safari, due to the fact that most WEB publishers are unaware of that they should include color profiles in their images. Today, Safari effectively disables color management when the color profile is missing, a correct but not very practical approach. In reality, most images published on the WEB are in fact sRGB or close to that but without a color profile. In order to enhance the WEB experience for the vast community of Safari users, could you PLEASE include at least the option in Safari, to "Assume sRGB for WEB colors". Since Safari is already color managed, it should mean only a few lines of code in the Safari application.

I did this, but probably we need a lot of users to complain before it gets fixed. It has been like this for ever, but I really expected it to be fixed in Safari 3.

See also http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5204498&#5204498 and http://www.tomasjonsson.eu for more information

Tomas

It took me doing a google search for my question once again to find this reply. I wrote to tons of different forums and completely missed the reply (which is actually one of the few).

We always work in srgb, upload our images to the web in srgb, and we never work untagged. But we still have to the problem where everything is assumed to be Adobe 98 on the Eizo CG221.

Thank you so much for your reply and well written complaint for Apple. I hope more people will start requesting this.

Does anyone else have an Eizo CG221 that is experiencing a similar problem?