If you have ever played with image manipulation software, like Photoshop, you’ll know the amazing possibilities for adjustment of photographic images at your disposal, especially if you start with a DSLR ‘RAW’ image. Once you have massaged the image to perfection, adjusting colour, tone, size, highlights & shadows etc, you save it for printing or reduce it for the web, and that’s the end of it. Or is it?

After uploading 200 or so images to my Flickr account, I was shocked to discover yesterday that they were not being displayed properly. Photograph colour was slightly off. Reds were slightly orange, yellows were slightly green, it was subtle but noticeable, when comparing the original to the uploaded version.

Although baffled at first, after investigation it turns out that the explanation is very simple: I had saved my photos using the (photography standard) AdobeRGB colour space, and most current web browsers can’t display this properly. The image displays fine, when viewed as a file on my computer. But drop it into a web page, and the colours are wrong!

So, to get my 200+ photographs to display correctly in a web browser, they need to have their colour space converted to sRGB (the web default) before saving. Not a pleasant prospect. Browsers display images with sRGB colour space without any problems because they ignore the colour space information anyway. The default colour interpretation is fine.

There is good news. New browsers, like Safari 3, and the impending Firefox 3, support non-sRGB colour spaces in images. You are more likely to see better photographic quality using those browsers in the near future. However, as usual, web designers will have to accomodate the usual backwardness of Internet Explorer for some time to come.