p.1 #1 · Web browsers and viewing images and color-management
OK I looked into browsers a bit more:
1. IE8 - it does no color management at all
Running it on a standard gamut monitor:
It does no color-management at all so it makes wide gamut images a total mess and while it shows sRGB OKish, strictly speaking, unless your monitor uses fancy internal calibration it actually doesn't display even sRGB images entirely correctly as it assumes your monitor's native gamut and saturation curves are exactly sRGB which is pretty much unheard unless it's super specialized or you have a higher-end wide gamut running an excellent sRGB emulation mode and if you didn't calibrate the monitor to sRGB TRC the tone response curve will be a bit off.
sRGB images will look reasonably correct but not quite entirely unless the monitor has internal calibration, the gamut mapping to your monitor will not be done, the tone response curve will probably be slightly off (assuming monitor was calibrated to gamma 2.2 and not sRGB TRC)
AdobeRGB images will look a bit muted
ProphotoRGB images will look extremely muted
Running it on a wide gamut monitor:
sRGB images will look radically over-saturated
AdobeRGB images will look reasonably close to correct but not exactly
ProphotoRGB images will look a bit under-saturated
2. IE9 - it recognizes image profiles but instead of translating them to the monitor's profile it simply translates them all to sRGB
On a standard gamut monitor:
sRGB,AdobeRGB,ProphotoRGB images will look reasonably correct but not quite entirely unless the monitor has internal calibration, the gamut mapping to your monitor will not be done, the tone response curve will probably be slightly off (assuming monitor was calibrated to gamma 2.2 and not sRGB TRC)
On a wide gamut monitor:
sRGB, AdobeRGB, ProphotoRGB images will all look radically over-saturated
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3. Chrome - some versions on some OS do some color-management, in some cases only if you add a special command line tag to the icon that launches it
It does not take into account image profiles at all.
In some cases it will take into account monitor profiles, when it does not then it behaves as IE8 above, when it does then it is as follows....
On a standard gamut monitor (when using partial CM if avail and turned on):
sRGB should look correct
AdobeRGB images will look muted
ProphotoRGB images will look very muted
On a wide gamut monitor (when using partial CM if avail and turned on):
sRGB images should look correct
AdobeRGB and ProphotoRGB images will look varying degrees of wrong, probably somewhat and very much under-saturated, respectively
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4. Firefox - any recent version should be automatically fully color-managed
All images on any profiles monitor in any mode should look as correct as they can in that monitor, in that mode to the best of the ability of the quality of the monitor profile.
It can even be set so that non-tagged images and elements will be assumed to be sRGB so it can even color-manage text, backgrounds, blocks, untagged images properly in all cases.
THIS IS THE BEST
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5. Safari - need to look into it more, apparently many versions have a fair amount of color management, but I'm not quite sure of all the details, many versions may be almost as good as Firefox other than not color-managed untagged images and elements, so text and untagged images and background blocks of color may look radioactive on a wide gamut monitor in wide gamut mode perhaps even if the images are all proper.
p.1 #2 · Web browsers and viewing images and color-management
I've always made sure all photos I posted online were in SRGB. My understanding is that's the best we can do to make things look somewhat consistent between different browsers, is that right?
