colour management problem

[plato]

Not sure if there is something I'm doing wrong, but my photos were shot in SRGB, edited and saved (maximum quality 12) in photoshop CS with the ICC profile set to SRGB. And yet, the strange thing is that my photo looks different when viewed on the same monitor in photoshop, safari, internet explorer, photo mechanic and iview media pro. What gives?

Btw, my 15" powerbook lcd is regularly calibrated with gretag macbeth's eye one display.

An example of what I'm talking about can be found <a href="http://www.photokalia.com/colours.jpg">here</a>. Most noticeable is the shift in the blue colour on the shirt. The picture appears most similar between iview, safari and photoshop, while the blue on the shirt looks very different in internet explorer and photo mechanic. Also, the picture appears more contrasty in photo mechanic.

I understand that you can't control what other people will see on their monitors since not everyone is colour managed. But if the image is tagged as SRGB and the profile embedded, shouldn't it look the same at least on my computer, whether I'm viewing it in Internet Explorer, Safari or an image viewing software?

[PacAce]

Your situation is curious because I don't have any problems with any of my applications showing color different from what PSCS is showing. I even tried downloading your sample image to see if Safari or IE will display it differently from PSCS and they didn't.

You might want to run the ColorSync untility (under Applications > Utilities) and see if maybe you have a "broken" or improperly specified color profile for your monitor or your default RGB.

[René Damkot]

Isn't it because IE isn't colour managed, so doesn't use any profiles, so uses your monitor profile for displaying instead of converting sRGB to monitor profile?

[plato]

I'm aware that the windows version of IE isn't colour managed. However from what I read on this site http://www.ekdahl.org/kurs/colormanage.htm (see quote below), it appears that this may not apply to Macs when the photo is tagged with an ICC profile. In this case, my photo was tagged with the SRGB profile.

I'm going to do a recalibration of my display in case it's got something to do with my monitor profile. Thanks and any further insight is appreciated!

Quote:
Ethan Hansen wrote, in the same forum: "with some work, you can tame the web for folks who use calibrated monitors and some browsers. On the Mac end, both Safari and IE honour embedded profiles if the correct ColorSync settings are made. On the Windows front, you can use the ColorInfo tag to specify a color space for IE viewing (really only practical for sRGB)."

In the same forum he writes 2004-09-24."If you have ColorSync enabled, there is a difference between how Safari and IE handle untagged images on OSX. IE assumes all untagged images are sRGB - a smart choice. Safari assumes that all untagged images are in your monitor color space - no less dumb than using your monitor profile as the default RGB space in Photoshop."