imageTonite, after processing some of the pictures of the kids I took earlier in the evening, I uploaded a few of them to Flickr. In the process, I discovered something a bit troubling. The uploaded images on Flickr looked washed out! I looked closely at the settings in the Flickr upload tool and discovered it resizes the uploads due to size limitation. While JPEG is a lossy compression, resizing should not produce visible differences between compressions– otherwise, the format would be useless.

After reconfiguration, I re-uploaded a file in its entirety. I looked at the different sizes on Flickr and again, the image simply didn’t look faithfully replicated! Could the bits be altered I thought? So I downloaded the picture and compared it against the original JPEG. No difference in file size, good! I viewed the 2 files in Photoshop and they look identical, again good!

This meant that there is a visible difference in the rendering of the images on Flickr in the browser. A partial screen dump above shows the browser on top of Photoshop, both displaying the same image of the same size. The difference in coloration is obvious. But at this point I no longer suspect Flickr and began to suspect the browser; so I loaded the original JPEG file into Firefox & IE. Eureka, I see the same difference between the browser and Photoshop.

I didn’t get it, while I understand HTML is limited to web color space, I always thought JPEG is rendered in the browser without such limitation. Then I remember reading about Safari rendering JPEGs better than other browsers. I hit Flickr with it and bingo– chalk up more love for Apple from me! Safari rendered the image faithfully!

It turns out some systems (devices or software) are built without color management. Vista and Safari render photos faithfully because just as Photoshop, they have color management and will take into account the embedded ICC profiles in their rendering algorithms. Whereas other system like IE & Firefox and my printer, don’t have color management and render photographs with unpredictable color maps.

This was a lesson in color management for me. For a good example on color management in web browswers, check out this article.