Color management in Safari is broken in Mavericks too.

I've written here about the color management problems with Lightroom on Mavericks before here and here. With the recent release of OS X 10.9.5, color management now appears to work right in Aperture and in iPhoto. However, it is still broken in Safari and preview. This is quite disturbing. Amazingly, both Chrome and Firefox do the color management right. It appears that Safari has built-in code to deal with sRGB tagged images because it treats them differently than any other embedded profile. It ignores the sRGB gamma curve and assumes it is the same as your display gamma profile! Below is a little test link for your pleasure to illustrate the problem. Rollover to switch between adobeRGB and sRGB tagged images. The sRGB image will have the darkest patches blocked completely in Safari. The adobeRGB image is correctly displayed. In Chrome on Mac OS X, since it is color managed, you will see only a very subtle difference due to the gammas being different in adobeRGB and sRGB and there therefore being subtle bit errors but both displays are essentially correct. The same is true for Firefox.

Mouse over to see the problem. Loading the alternate image might take a few seconds. You won't see it unless you are on Mavericks/Yosemite and are using Safari. If the darker patches change brightness, you have the bug.

On a well behaved browser these two images should be close to identical. Safari in Mavericks (I tested 7.1) is no longer well behaved and completely destroys the shadows. It is important to note that preview.app is also broken but in a different way. Strangely it does not display black correctly. Aperture and iPhoto do behave correctly as of 10.9.5 but used to be wrong in earlier versions of Mac OS X Mavericks. Photoshop, since it uses its own color management routines, behaves correctly too. Lightroom only behaves correctly in the Library views as I have shown before. In Develop it has the same blocked shadow problem as you see in Safari. This problem is non-existent in 10.8.

Edit: Before any confusion arises, I need to explain the numbers in the images above. The sRGB version of the image shows the values of r,g,and b in the sRGB color space as encoded in the file. The adobeRGB version is the same file, but converted to adobeRGB color space in Photoshop. The numbers are still the r,g,b values of the patches in sRGB space, but the file is simply encoded in adobeRGB. The display should therefore be identical in correctly color managed environments as it is in Photoshop. EDIT:10/17/14. Finally got around to installing Yosemite. Unsurprisingly, this is still broken in Safari like it is in Mavericks and the Webkit nightlies. Unfortunate. Strange that this is not getting picked up as this bug is present on every single Mac that has Mavericks or Yosemite installed. No matter whether it is hardware calibrated or not. Mac OS pre Mavericks did not have this bug.

Further quantification of the Mavericks color management problem

EDIT: Adobe fixed this bug for most types of display profiles in LR 5.7

I spent some time further quantifying the display problem that Mavericks introduced and that affects Lightroom, Aperture, and every other application that uses Apple color management libraries. (EDIT 10/19/14 - Apple fixed this bug in Aperture, right now it only affects Lightroom and Safari - all other color managed apps are fine - in Yosemite the problem persists). In short, the problem is that shadows get crushed upon display. This is a serious bug that is remaining unfixed since OS X 10.9 and is apparently present even in the Yosemite beta. I am trying to raise awareness of this bug since I am getting no reply from Apple not from a bug report and not from directly emailing folks there. This should get fixed as it makes it tough to do serious work on Mavericks. You can work around it by using Photoshop which uses its own color management library or by using the soft proof feature in Lightroom. Mac OS X 10.8 and below do not have this problem and correctly show the shadows. This is independent of what color calibration you use and even shows up when you use Apple's supplied profile for your display.

I generated a simple photoshop file that has swatches of grey ranging from 1 to 100 in 8-bit scale and then used the system color taste dropper that you can get to if you open textedit and click the text color box. Then use "Show colors" and you can then "taste" any color on your screen and get the display values. These values are what is actually sent to the monitor and so are very useful for this purpose. Below I plot the values seen in Photoshop (correct), those in Lightroom Library and Lightroom Develop. I am not showing Aperture as those are the same as Lightroom Develop and also very wrong. I am using a double log scale to really show you the problem areas in the darker regions below r,g,b=25.

I did this using the nice plotly plotting service. The images sometimes take a short time to show up. You can find the data in the link on the bottom of the plot. Photoshop's light bump in the shadows is correct as sRGB has a little knee in the shadows. Lightroom Develop due to the Mavericks bug displays way lower intensity than it should leading to the crushed shadows that people are observing.

I also created the same swatch file in the color space of my monitor profile. The display of those swatches should happen at exactly the same display value as the input file. This really illustrates the problem I think.

Photoshop clearly does this correctly. The relation is almost exactly linear and any deviations are a single bit difference which is just a rounding error. Lightroom Develop shows way below. Lightroom Library is close but with a larger error than Photoshop. Below is the same data bit plotted as display error.

Mavericks causes Lightroom Library to be off by a full 8 points in the shadows! I hope this data is useful to somebody and helps some folks that have puzzled over dark shadows in Mavericks applications.

Serious color management bug in Mac OS 10.9 "Mavericks"

Update Feb 26, 2014 - Just updated a machine to 10.9.2, the update that fixes the nasty SSL bug. It does NOT fix this color management bug.

After quite a bit of testing I have come to the conclusion that there is a serious color management bug in Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. This is subtle but will result in your shadows being displayed much darker than they really are. The bug affects almost every color managed program and is present whether you use a display profiler such as a Spyder or whether you use the built in profiles. The bug was introduced with 10.9 and is not present in 10.8. So if you are a pro using Mac OS X, stay on 10.8 for now. Strangely enough, Photoshop displays correctly, but it is the only program that does consistently. Aperture plugs the shadows. Lightroom displays correctly in the Library module but incorrectly in the Develop module which makes developing your pictures when looking for shadow detail difficult. I already submitted a bug report to Apple so we'll see if it gets fixed. I am not the first to notice this as is clear from this thread on Adobe's Lightroom forum.

This is the display in Photoshop(correct) on 10.9.1

This is Aperture on Mac OS X 10.9.1:

The first row has disappeared and the second row is much darker than it should be

This is Lightroom Library module (close to correct)

And this is Lightroom Develop (way off again):

Hope this is useful to somebody. The test file came from lagom, which I turned into a RGB tiff file with an included sRGB profile so that Aperture could read it. Again, on 10.8 the display is identical in all software. Also, it doesn't matter whether you calibrate or not or what calibrator you use, they all show the issue. I used a Spyder 3 Pro here but the issue shows up with other calibrators too.

EDIT: This bug is fixed in Aperture. It is still present in Lightroom and Safari

Snow Leopard

As everybody by now should know, Apple released their update to their OS - Snow Leopard. For photographers, this update packs a lot of punch. According to these benchmarks, you get quite large speed increases in Lightroom (64 bit version especially), CS4, and Aperture, from going Snow Leopard and even bigger gains if you have a machine that can run the 64-bit kernel. So if you run Mac OS X and use programs like Lightroom or Aperture, this seems a no-brainer update. Even more exciting than the 64-bit part is the promise of even larger speedups with technologies that make it easy for developers to use the computing power on your graphics card (openCL) or trivial multiprocessing (Grand Central). So even bigger speed increases might be expected especially for image editing programs. Interesting times.

EDIT there is now a fantastic review of Leopard on Ars Technica. If you're a nerd like me there's lots to be excited about. The review is 23 pages and quite thorough.

Apple's new OS defaults to gamma 2.2

The good news just keeps coming in. Apple's new version of Mac OS X - Snow Leopard - will default to the more standard gamma 2.2 instead of 1.8. Read it here from the horse's mouth.

Leopard late (October)

Just read that Leopard will be late. That is a major bummer. As rumored, this will also delay the highly anticipated (by me at least) Keynote, which I use extensively in my daily job and for photography presentations. Apple writes that this has to do the iPhone. If true, that is very annoying as I couldn't care less about the iPhone, but I do care about the Mac OS. On the other hand, if you want to make some money in the stock market, wait for the inevitable plummet in Apple's stock prices and start buying. Maybe then you can actually afford one of those silly iPhones.