Color Space

In my last post, I pointed out that I didn't like the way Andrew looked on my browser (Firefox). Here's what I wrote:

Andrew looks very cold. I warmed up the photo in Lightroom, and it looks good on my computer, but it looks cold when viewed through Flickr. More research is needed. Update: My friend Swarup did a little research for me and dug up this morsel on the Flickr help forum. Essentially Firefox, IE, Google Chrome, and perhaps other browsers strip away the color space profile. Safari thankfully does not, so if you compare Andrew's photo on Safari vs. the other browsers I listed, you'll see that on Safari, his face and the sunset light are considerably warmer.

How did this happen? I hadn't seen this problem before, so why did it appear all of a sudden? The answer is I recently read a tutorial extolling the virtues of ProPhotoRGB, so I began to export my JPG's with the wider ProPhotoRGB color space instead of AdobeRGB. I thought that this would be a good idea because more is better and how could it possibly hurt? I thought the worse thing that could happen is that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between ProPhotoRGB and AdobeRGB. Well, it turns out I was wrong. Because many browsers don't recognize (or just don't like) the ProPhotoRGB color space, they choose to ignore it and therefore don't render the image as the photographer intended. Oops! Live and learn. The photo above uses the AdobeRGB color space and if you compare it to the photo in the previous post, you'll notice that the photo above is considerably warmer. Color space is something I haven't completed wrapped my brain around. The relationship between color space and browsers is just the tip of the iceberg. There are monitors and printers to think about as well! It's all so complex, yet so interesting.