help with colours in web browser

[dave_bass5]

I have a smugmug gallery and have been puting my 350d shots on it at full res as a semi-storage location more than anything else but i find the pics look a bit muted in colour compared to when i view them either is PS or even winXP picture and fax viewer.
do i need to over compensate the colours or is it about imbedding a profile of some sort?
Im using sRGB through out my work flow and its not the monitor as i have access to 3 PC's and the effect is the same, although the pics look different on each PC but the difference is still there.
thanks for any advice, im still very new to all this.

Dave.

[rammy]

The internet uses a much smaller colour range and so will show your pictures differently. The "Web Colour Gamut" can be seen in PS. These are the colours that are being used to show your image.

Save your originals "Save for Web" option in PS and you will see a difference.

[dave_bass5]

Thanks for the reply but im not sure i fully understand.
I know the web uses fewer colours and understand what you are saying but if i preview a pic in save for web it looks the same as the original preview, not what im seeing on smugmug.
so for online galleries should i save for web? i always thought this setting was to get the pic as small as possible by varying the different settings rather than to adjust the colour.
Maybe its jst my eyes. thanks for the help

Dave

[rammy]

Thanks for the reply but im not sure i fully understand.
Dave

You need to understand web color gamuts, or web safe colours AND what the local protocol is that your internet browser uses and how this works. This has nothing to do with the online gallery. Remember that "basically put", there are two end user machine types out there, Mac and PC. Both display your images in the correct colour range, on different browsers. Why, because of the web colour space standard. And yes, this is a recognised standard.

Read this:

http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/websafe1/websafe_colors.html

[dave_bass5]

Thanks. the link was very interesting but sorry still didnt answer my question.
Im already awere of the reduced colour pallet for web (i have designed a couple of basic web sites) and about dithering but what i cant understand is this.
If i save for web as sugested wouldnt that then muck up the colours for printing. most online galleries offer this feature so i cant see this being the ideal way.
I do understand now why they look different (and its not much) but is there a way of setting my browser(s) to show a wider range of colours?
I have also just viewed one of my shots in IE6 from my PC and it looks fine but the exact same shot on smugmug looks a bit muted.
Sorry if ive still got this wrong but thanks very much for taking the time to explain.

Dave.

[rammy]

If i save for web as sugested wouldnt that then muck up the colours for printing. most online galleries offer this feature so i cant see this being the ideal way.

Yes it does "muck the colours" for printing because save for web is optimised for viewing on a monitor, this includes bit depth (72 DPI). If galleries provide you the opporunity to print an image then you are printing the viewed image. I don't think ANYONE would want to put an image on a web gallery that is "print worthy". What is the use in that? Free print quality images online, gimme some of that please!



I do understand now why they look different (and its not much) but is there a way of setting my browser(s) to show a wider range of colours?

No. W3C (world Wide Web consortium) and others have decided a set of "local protocols" that are a standard across browsers, OS, machines etc.

[Poco]

It sounds like something else is wrong here. If they look different in IE before the upload than while viewing them on the site then it sound like something else is happening. Can a web page specify how the images it contains should be shown?

What happens if you download the jpg from the site to your computer and view that in IE (or PS)? Do they still look wrong or are they back to the original look? If they look different than the file you uploaded then I would say the upload process has modified them. If they look the same then there is probably nothing you can do.