Improve colours in your Firefox browser
June 22, 2008
Basically if you are using Firefox as your Internet browser you can quickly change a setting to improve the colours you see while visiting sites with images and photos.
The details below have been taken from the International Colour Consortium’s site here (which tells you how to check and test the colours) and from LifeHacker’s site here (which tells you how to fix the colours).
I didn’t see much difference in some of my photos, but did in this photo on my Flickr page. The colours become more vibrant so its well worth giving it a go.
From LifeHacker:
“If the digital photo you just uploaded looks washed out on Flickr compared to in your desktop image editor, that’s because Firefox 3’s advanced color profile support isn’t turned on. To enable it, type about:config in Firefox 3’s address bar, then click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button. Then, in the Filter field, type gfx.color_management.enabled and set that value to true (its default value is false). Restart Firefox. From there on in, your photo colors will be richer than they were. Why isn’t this value true by default? Well, according to Mozilla, you’ll see a 10-15% performance hit using this setting, but if you’ve got a reasonably fast machine, it’ll be worth the better-looking photos. Hit the link below for an extended explanation of Firefox’s color profile support.
From International Colour Consortium:
“Is your system ICC Version 4 ready? One way to find out is to view or print this page using your system. The test image uses a mix of unusual ICC version 4 and version 2 profiles, one for each quadrant of the image. The test is also available in pdf format, as in both html and pdf file formats each image can use an unique profiles.
| Profiles in each quadrant: | v4 e-sRGB | v4 YCC-RGB |
| v2 GBR | v2 Adobe RGB |
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Expected Results
The display of the above test image on your system will change according to the abilities of your system. Here are three possible outcomes. (These are RGB screenshots from actual systems)
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The system supports these ICC version 4 and version 2 profiles |
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The system supports ICC version 2 profiles only |
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The system does not support these ICC profiles |
Sources
The test and image were provided by Lars Borg, Adobe Systems, November 2003. The embedded profiles are provided by Adobe Systems. GBR is a Green-Blue-Red color space.”
.photography site: squashyfrog.com
.photography blog: blog.squashyfrog.com
.flickr photostream: flickr.com/photos/koltregaskes
.deviantart gallery: koltregaskes.deviantart.com
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