What color is the car above? Is it orange or purple? Well, if you see purple on your web browser, then your browser does not follow ICC Color profiles. The majority of images we see online has sRGB color profile, but when an image has a different ICC color profile, some browsers do not read it correctly or at all. Thanks to Peta Pixel, now you can test your own web browser. This is important to test out because while you may want your images to be a certain way, the way the colors comes out on your browser or your client’s browser may not be correct.

I use Windows 7 Pro, and on my Google Chrome, that image is purple, which is wrong.

Internet Explorer 9, however, does read the ICC color profile, and therefore shows the image correctly.





By the way, your monitor profile will also affect the image differently. Some browsers can show more accurate colors in relation to your monitor profile, while others won’t. This is important to know because even when I export images with sRGB from Lightroom, the colors that I see on Windows Image Preview or Lightroom is not necessarily the same thing when uploaded to my website and viewed on Chrome.


And good news for Mac OSX users. Peta Pixel also said that any browsers running on OSX should not have any color profile mismatches. So to ensure that you do get the most out of your images, when uploading your images online, make sure it’s in sRGB profile, and if colors have to be super critical, either double check your uploaded images on several browsers or send your clients the images to view outside the browser.

Be sure to visit Peta Pixel’s Is Your Browser Color Managed article to see which browsers follow ICC color profiles.

Also, it looks like that iOS browsers are not color managed, as talked about in this post by Jeffrey Friedl. He goes more in depth about color management, as well as some images of what may happen if you’re not careful with your color management (yes, his images will look pretty crazy if your browser doesn’t have color management).

Image on a browser with color management



Image on a browser with no color management

Related posts:

1. How to Color Correct Portraits and Skin Tones – Lightroom Color Correction Video Tutorial
2. Selective Color Enhancing – Weekly Lightroom Edit w/ Post Production Pye – Episode 8
3. How to Adjust Colors via the HSL, Color and B&W Panel – Lightroom Video Tutorial
4. How to Color Correct Landscape Images – Lightroom Video Tutorial
5. How to Color Correct Images Under Tungsten Lighting – Lightroom Video Tutorial