Color management still broken in Safari

We're at Yosemite 10.10.3 and Safari 8.0.5 and color management for sRGB images is still broken in Safari. Not good. Test here: http://lagemaat.blogspot.com/2014/09/color-management-in-safari-is-broken-in.html

Lightroom 5.7 fixes the color management bug

Adobe fixed the bug plugging up the shadows in the Develop module of Lightroom. Get the update here as fast as you can.

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

Chrome suddenly color managed

This one snuck by me. I have complained many times in the past about deficiencies in browser color management. Chrome and Firefox are seen wavering back and forth all the time. I recently lamented the fact that Chrome was not color managed. However, I happened to open it recently and noticed that the color was not off as I was used to on my wide gamut screen (Chrome version 16.0.912.75). In fact it looked 'normal'! So I quickly whipped up a comparison between browser and the gold standard in color management: Photoshop. The screenshot was converted from my monitor profile to sRGB for web display.



As you can see, contrary to my previous post using Chrome 13, it is now color managed! This is great news as we now have three browsers that are color managed, at least on Mac OS X. I understand that on Windows, the latest Chrome is not yet color managed, which if true, is a shame. Nevertheless, this is a great development and a return to what I called "web browser bliss" years ago, but what was dampened from that initial optimism since then because of regressions at Mozilla and Google. Here is to hoping that the last holdout IE, which still does not convert to the display profile as it should, will at some time join 21st century even if 2012 is a little late for finally doing what was proposed by Microsoft themselves in 1996.

Finally, by checking the icc v4 testing page in all browsers, I can now report the following for the browser versions current at the date of posting:

Browser	icc v2 compliant?	icc v4 compliant?	converts to display profile?	assumes sRGB for untagged images?
Safari	yes	yes	yes	no
Chrome	yes	yes	yes	no
Firefox	yes	no	yes (some v4 profiles work!)	no (yes with secret setting enabled)

In conclusion, if you are on a Mac and care about color rendering, I can now heartily recommend Chrome next to Firefox and Safari.

Why I do not use Chrome - even though it is fantastic

Is captured in the below screenshot


Click for full resolution.
Left Firefox 5, middle Safari 5.1, right Chrome 13.0.782.107. As you can see, Chrome renders the desert sunset image drastically different. The subtle orange hue turns into red.
This is as seen on my wide gamut display that was calibrated user a Spyder 3. I converted the screenshot from my display profile to sRGB for web display so this cut down a large portion of the difference as the red orange is out of sRGB gamut. In reality it is more drastic than can be shown on the web. The sidebar image of the patch of marsh flowers in Mayflower Gulch for example renders in a very garish green and comically red mountain range. The shadow portions under the flowers are too dark and some detail disapears.

The reason for these differences is that Google in their infinite wisdom when they released chrome cut out color management which had been enabled and present in the developer releases for mac. And despite widespread outcries, it hasn't been fixed and the flag that you can use on windows to enable color management does not work on Macs and apparently not even on windows anymore. If you are a photographer or designer who calibrates their screens, this really impacts you and all your images will display wrong in Chrome on your system. Only Safari and Firefox (if you make sure to calibrate to a v2 icc profile) will work correct. Firefox has an advantage over Safari in that it will even color manage untagged images if you set it up to do so in the secret settings. The failing of Chrome in rendering images correctly is especially strong if you work on a wide gamut display or on a laptop display. On good normal (sRGB gamut) screens it is even a problem for shadow rendering where unmanaged browsers will show you plugged up shadows. This is due to the fact that the display is calibrated for gamma 2.2, while sRGB has a linear tone curve in the shadows. This might not be that big of a deal as the hyper saturation that you get on wide-gamut displays though.

I understand that Chrome cut out its color management to make sure Chrome renders like Internet Explorer and to be slightly faster than with color management, but why would you want to target the lowest common denominator? It's a pity because it is otherwise a fast and capable browser and I actually prefer it for most other uses especially Google+. I would be happy with a simple flag I can enable somewhere as I realize that not everybody needs this.

Please Google, give me a flag!

Links: Why color management is so important in browsers. All about color profiles and color managed apps here.

IE 9 still not color managed?

I don't do windows, so I haven't checked it yet, but apparently the new IE 9 beta still doesn't correctly color manage. It will only take images with spaces different than sRGB and translate them to sRGB. It will NOT use the display profile. That is pathetic and you cannot call it color management. Microsoft claims their color management supports v4 profiles. However, this is meaningless if you don't support the monitor profile as barely any image you will find online will have a v4 profile. Many monitor profiles are v4 though so there it would be useful, if only it actually did anything with it. Contrast this with Firefox, that even though it does not support v4 profiles, will use the monitor profile (as long as it is a v2 profile). Here it makes sense to refer to Microsoft's own document from 14 years ago, which makes clear that a browser when encountering a tagged image should respect the image's profile AND convert to the monitor profile.

What browser do you use?

A few days ago I started tracking site visits using the fantastic and free google analytics. Checking it out this morning, I noticed something extraordinary in the browser statistics. First, let me show you the stats over the last week (click for bigger)



Internet Explorer is in 4th place here! The top two browsers are color managed (Chrome on Windows is not color managed by default contrary to the mac version). Of course this is just one site with a built-in bias towards more geeky folks so it doesn't mean much for the wider web, but still this is extraordinary and a great sign of progress.

Lastly, I am surprised at the number of mobile visitors. I had 8 iPhones, 3 iPads, and one Android device visit the page. Strangely my Blackberry doesn't show up even though I know I looked at the site with it. This probably has to do with everything going through a proxy.

Costco's photo printer service

I had heard a while ago that costco would now print 16x20 and 20x30 in house in their stores instead of at a lab. I never thought much about it assuming that the quality would be low until I noticed at my local lab that they are using Epson 7880 printers. These are really high quality printers using fantastic inks. Even better, costco subcontracts with dry creek photo who regularly profile the printers and provide instructions on how to use the ICC profiles. These profiles also work great in Lightroom. I sent a few very large files to my local costco and had them print and the prints are gorgeous. Basically perfect color reproduction using the supplied profiles, fantastic toning and very vibrant colors. I was floored that they can offer these prints for the ridiculously low prices they charge ($8.99 for a 20x30). There is no way you can print this large yourself for anywhere near this price. The paper is not extremely good, but pretty reasonable and this gives you a closed loop color management. Pretty amazing.

Firefox 3.6 beta

The Firefox folks released a new beta of FF 3.6. Color management is still broken badly in it. This in contrast with Chrome and Safari.

Firefox 3.5 color management

Am I nuts or did Firefox 3.5 release break their color management? It no longer passes the icc test whereas Firefox 3.0 with the secret setting would perfectly. It also no longer grabs my monitor profile where 3.0 would correctly! What is going on here? If this is true than Firefox messed up in a major fashion!





EDIT: It's true. Firefox 3.5 dropped support for v4 profiles. This is a major step backwards. Most display calibration solutions nowadays generate v4 profiles and therefore color management will not work in FF 3.5. FF 3.05 works just fine. Very disappointing.

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.

Yes, webbrowser bliss is here

Google has just released a Developer release of Chrome for Mac OS X and lo-and-behold, it still color manages. I was afraid that there was a chance that google would disable it in the final releases, so I am very happy to see this happening. Chrome manages exactly like Safari in that it doesn't manage untagged images nor CSS colors. Firefox has a mode that will color manage everything and the upcoming Firefox 3.5 will have Safari-like management turned on by default. This will cause the situation to soon be that 3 major browsers will be color managed and the dinky exception will be IE. Excellent! Now if somebody could check out if the latest developer builds for windows also color manage (use this simple page) that would be excellent. The current release on windows doesn't but it would be superb if they are changing that too.

Here is the proof: Three color managing browsers on my Mac with a wide gamut screen (screenshot converted back from my display profile to sRGB so you will see the right colors too). The colors in these images are rendered exactly the same as I found out by substracting them in Photoshop.

Chrome color managed?

Chrome, Google's new browser that is based on WebKit, was not color managed in the release for windows. I saw a link to some prerelease binaries of Chrome for the Mac on Daring Fireball. And lo and behold. Doing a little test shows that these prerelease builds of Chrome now color manage tagged images. It doesn't manage untagged images like Firefox does, but uses the Safari method. This is a very good development and counters my initial criticism. Thanks Google!

Illustration: Chrome color managed!

A new day! Firefox color manages by default

Firefix is now enabling icc support by default in their new beta! See this page. This is great news



The default settings only enable color correction for tagged images, just like Safari does. You can enable full color management in a similar way as before. There is now a "gfx.color_management.mode" variable in the about:config box that you set to 1 in order to also manage untagged images and CSS colors as if they are sRGB. This is very helpful for folks with wide gamut displays. IE as always is far behind in this field.

To be complete: Here is a link showing how to enable color management in the current Firefox release. Doing this indeed color manages even untagged images. A very important feature.

The Boston Globe's awesome photo galleries - all in adobeRGB?

I always thoroughly enjoy the beautiful galleries that the Boston Globe publishes. This time is no exception. I am always struck by the beautifully saturated colors they appear to be able to hit. Of course I always use color managed browsers. Webkit/Safari is my favorite, although I also use Firefox 3 with the secret setting enabled. So I had never noticed this before but all the images on the galleries in the globe are in adobeRGB color space. Of course my browser is color managed so this doesn't matter and it even leads to even better colors on my wide gamut display, however, if you use a non-managed browser like internet Explorer (trash it!) or Chrome, you might want to fire up Safari or Firefox (don't forget to enable the color management) and check out their galleries. The difference is stunning, especially in the gorgeous reds and yellows they have such as the fires near Melbourne of a while ago. They are so much more amazing in a managed browser. This is especially true if you use a laptop with a small gamut display such as a Apple MacBook.

Roll over to see how much better this image looks in a color-managed browser, even on a fully calibrated screen! These are screenshots from the aforementioned bushfire galleries from Firefox using managed and unmanaged settings. The awesome (in the original sense of the word of inspiring apprehension or fear) destructive power of the flames really comes out in an unsettling manner in the managed rendering. Be patient, depending on your connection, the first time this can take a few seconds to appear. After that, it will be instantaneous.


Even though this is simply an error by the web people at that newspaper (they should use sRGB for everything), this is another big argument for using a managed browser at all times.

Picasa 3.0 beta - no color management?

I just downloaded and tested Picasa 3.0 which google brought out in beta for the Mac. The program has an interesting UI and is nice and speedy. However, it does not colormanage. What the ...? Does Google realize that it is 2009? More than 15 years after color management was introduced to a main stream OS? Nowadays color management is a basic requirement for photographic apps. The absence of it makes Picasa useless for serious amateur or pro photographic work. Even worse, on uncalibrated Macs used by most consumers (i.e. the Picasa target audience), all colors will be wrong and images will have too low contrast making it even useless for amateurs. This is because out-of-the-box Macs come calibrated at the wrong gamma. Also, this means that if you have a laptop display, even if you calibrated and profiled it, you will always see the wrong colors. Therefore, my advice is to avoid this program like the plague until they fix it!

How Picasa displays two identical but for the color profile images (click for 100% image converted to sRGB from my monitor profile, so you can see what I see on my calibrated and profiled adobeRGB gamut display).


As you expect for color-stupid apps on a wide gamut display, the sRGB image is too saturated, and the prophotoRGB image looks green and too dark.

Both are quite far off as this image shows which is in sRGB for the web:


This is going to be even worse on a standard uncalibrated Apple laptop display, where everything is going to be severely desaturated and too low contrast.

Is Chrome color managed?

Google released a new very interesting-looking browser called Chrome. It sports some very intriguing features and is based on Apple's WebKit, the code behind Safari. Unfortunately, Chrome is only available for Windows (come on Google!). Also, Google has a very very poor record on the question of color management. Their (windows-only too) picture utility Picasa is not managed. Their web service even strips profiles (horrifying) when you upload images. It is therefore not surprising that Chrome appears to not be color managed, not even using a preference regardless of its WebKit roots. What is it Google? The Stone Age? No color management in a browser is getting ridiculous, especially when you basically get it for free and you're writing one from the ground up. It's even more important with the growing prevalence of wide-gamut LCDs and small-gamut laptop displays and more and more display manufacturers shipping not super correct but usable profiles in their windows drivers. I would be fine with a simple preference (preferably less hidden than that in Firefox). It would be great if somebody could check this out as I don't have a Windows machine.

Update: I checked it on a windows machine and there is no color management anywhere in Chrome. Giant leap backwards indeed. While some of the technology in Chrome is very cool and it does feel fast and I like WebKit being there, this is quite disappointing. But unfortunately, since Picasa is STILL not color managed (and there it really matters a lot even when nobody that uses it calibrates their monitors), I don't think Chrome will ever get color management. A little like Microsoft and their IE.

I can't believe I haven't noticed this. Real color management in Firefox 3.0

I wrote earlier on how to enable color management in Firefox 3.0. It was great to see that finally a major browser next to Safari has color management, even if you have to go into a secret settings menu to enable it (see link above). At the time I assumed that the color management was just for images with attached tags. The same thing that Safari does. This would make Firefox, just like Safari, color foolish and causes lots of issues on Macs that are by default calibrated at a lower gamma than most windows PCs. However, and this was pointed out to me by outstanding photographer Greg Cope in a discussion on flickr, Firefox 3.0, with the color management enabled, color manages everything, CSS colors, text, and untagged images. If a page element has no attached profile, Firefox assumes sRGB. This is awesome and the absolute right thing to do. I tested it and it is absolutely true. If you have a Mac, enable this feature right away, even if you do not calibrate your screen. If you have a windows PC and you calibrate your screen, also enable this right away. On windows if you do not calibrate, the feature is not too useful as Windows assumes sRGB by default for the monitor profile. This brings Firefox quite a bit ahead of Safari and will make all web pages far better looking (no pale and too low contrast images anymore).