Web Browser Color Management

To display colors as originally defined within an image you must calibrate your display or projector. No device is perfect and each has it own limitations. The calibration will make a "best effort" at displaying an image.

Monitor and projector calibration is performed with a commercial product such as those from XRite (xrite.com).

Before calibrating your monitor and projector, adjust the brightness, contrast, and sharpness since they affect color rendition. You want to avoid highlight and shadow clipping. Your calibration software will provide instructions. Consider also searching the Internet for monitor and projector calibration.

Calibration is specific to a video adapter and monitor. When calibrating a projector, each screen used will also require calibration.

Many older web browsers do not support managed color and ignore profiles in your images. Instead of adjusting the image to match your monitor profile, the image may be sent directly to the screen. This means each monitor may see a different version of the same image, each different by how much your monitor differs from the profile associated with the image.

If you have a large gamut monitor capable of displaying a wider color space than sRGB (this is getting more common), the quality of the images displayed from websites gets even worse. If you have an older Macintosh and you have not changed your monitor’s gamma setting, you are also losing color space and images may appear dull.

When you prepare an image that will be displayed on a monitor or projector it may be helpful to "soft proof" the image in Photoshop to verify how it will display. This is because you may have a monitor with a large color gamut for editing in Photoshop, but your saved jpg file will be limited to sRGB. This can cause a shift in colors or contrast. In Photoshop, use the menu View, Proof Setup and select Monitor RGB. You can then toggle the proofing with the menu View, Proof Colors.

To avoid problems with browsers that do not properly handle profiles, all images are converted to the sRGB profile when displayed on your website. If your image has no profile, a sRGB profile is added when your image is uploaded.

If you are judging images using the web it is critical that you have color calibrated your monitor and you use a modern web browser. Projectors must be calibrated as well and you should set them up to expect sRGB profiled images so they do not try to enhance the projected images. Projector profiles must be specified in the Image Competition Manager program if you want that program to load your profiles.