web browser/ICC profile/

summary:

ICC profile               Mac browser                      Windows  browser &TV
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
embedded                use embedded profile          use sRGB                  
not embedded          use monitor ICC profile       use sRGB                        

lesson:
embed icc profile into photo; how?
when application is using monitor icc profile, problem comes when different systems have different profiles ( gamma, whitepoint?)

ICC :International Color Consortium

http://blogs.smugmug.com/great-prints/2005/06/27/mac-browsers-can-you-believe-your-eyes/
if Mac use ICC profile, problem is Mac monitor profile are quite different than the ones on Windows Machines

Every Windows browser — such as Internet Explorer & Firefox — adhere to The Simple Idea: just post your photo and don’t bother to bloat it with an ICC profile that a TV can’t understand anyway, and I’ll draw your photo with the crayons of sRGB.

On the Mac, the browsers Internet Explorer and Safari look for an ICC profile (few photos on the net have them) and use whatever box of crayons it specifies. In that case, what you see on your Mac is not what someone sees on Windows, their TV, or the excellent Firefox browser, which many Mac owners use.

It gets worse.

On the Mac, when no ICC profile is embedded in the photo, it uses the crayons of your monitor profile. That is, unless you use Internet Explorer on the Mac and you’ve taken the time to go into preferences and check the box that says use ColorSync. Then IE uses the crayons of sRGB.

On Windows, TV, cell phones, etc., your browser uses sRGB no matter what your monitor profile may be.

It gets worse.

Macs come with monitor profiles that are quite different than the ones on Windows machines. They are lighter, for one thing. Which is why photos look lighter on Macs than they do on Windows, TV, etc.

And that tricks many photographers into receiving darker-than-desired prints. That’s because the same box of crayons (sRGB) that works well on TV also works well for photographic prints using commercial printers, so the sRGB tide has swept all the major ones: Kodak, Shutterfly, Costco, Wolfe’s, Walgreen’s, EZ Prints, whcc, MPIX, Photobox, etc. They don’t know that you’re viewing photos on a Mac and that you think they’re lighter than they really are.

If you’re interested in seeing how your photos look to the rest of the world, you can go to the Apple menu > Preferences > Displays > Color and choose sRGB (it was called TV before the OS X Tiger release). You’ll also need to use the Firefox browser. No sacrifice there — it’s great.