Windows Vista Color Management
2007/12/03
Windows Vista boasts a shiny new color management system. But having “correct” colors may not always be the thing that you want, especially if you're displaying your work on the internet. At least that's what I learned in the past days.
So I bought a new PC with lots of power and resources for awesome image editing, which is of course pretty cool. After some weird problems with the internet connection (which I figured out was caused by an anti-virus program running in the background, screwing up the internet connection), everything seemed to work fine.
So I started working on photos and spent quite some time getting the colors to look fine. Then I exported the pictures and uploaded them to my photo website and Fotocommunity. When I looked at them in the browser, I noticed they looked kind of weird. The color temperature seemed colder than in Photoshop. In Windows itself (in the Windows Photo Gallery) it looks just like it does in Photoshop.
After some searches (Hai Googlz!) I tracked down the problem: Right, that new color management that is supposed to bring better (i. e. more correct) colors to our screen. Fact is though that no browser currently supports color management (I heard that Safari 3 will support CM though), so in a browser, images are displayed without color correction. And thus they look weird in my case, because they were made on a color corrected screen. If you say that you've never encountered this problem, it's probably because in Windows XP and earlier, there was no real color management (this new technology was developed by Microsoft in cooperation with Canon for Windows Vista, well, and general use in the future).
There seems to be no simple way to switch off the CM. Some websites say that in order to turn it off, you have to delete all monitor profiles from the color settings dialog. Then they colors should render fine (or wrong, if you take into account that the color corrected system actually shows the correct colors, whereas a browser does not). I tried this and it didn't work at all. It still looks exctly like before.
I'm beginning to feel a little pissed about this. All I want to do is work on my photos and I can't because my system tells me that the colors it uses are right, but my images will end up looking completely different everywhere else than on my own PC. Hooray for color management! (Do I sound sarcastic right now?)
Well, on the other hand, this slightly annoying experience doesn't even take into account that without color management, an image may in fact look completely different on different displays, because there is no standardized way to render colors. So whatever photo you see from me or anyone else may in reality look completely different (slightly exaggerating here).
This little story from work comes to my mind right now:
Me: “I added a light gray background behind the text.”
Colleague: “I don't see any background.”
It turned out that his cheap TFT display turned all bright colors into pure white.
(If anyone has an idea that could help me solve the CM problem, please contact me. All help is greatly appreciated.)
Comments
Karthik Abhiram – 2007-12-04 21:15:47
Disclaimer: No help offered in this comment like you mentioned in the post :)
This is something interesting I hadn't heard of before... Is this something that exists only in Vista? Strangely, when Varun was making the graphics for his website, we noticed one odd thing -- while images looked the same on the browsers we tested, background colours were darker on IE than on other browsers! So Varun cheated and used images where he wanted colours.
Don't know whether that has anything to do with what you wrote, but this immediately came to my mind after reading your post.
Heh, why all this confusion, I don't know... :)
Tobias – 2007-12-04 21:55:15
If you hadn't written a comment, I would have deleted the post right now. Unfortunately, the problem was not only caused by that color management thingy, but also to a certain extent by my own inattentiveness. I won't go into detail on that though, it's somewhat embarassing. ;-)
I haven't heard about the color problem in browsers before, but I think I can say for sure it is not due to the color management. Like I said, no current browser supports CM, unless you use the latest Safari 3 (someone told me Firefox 3 uses CM as well, but I wasn't able to verify that).
Varun – 2007-12-07 17:13:06
No no actually png images looked darker in IE than on other browsers. So I had to to use images everywhere so that everything is "evenly" darker in IE :)
But this color thing must be really frustrating... especially when it comes to photos :)
