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June 19, 2007 4:00 AM PDT
Safari ushers in better browser colors
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Unlike the prevailing browsers on the Internet--Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox--the Apple browser supports different ways of encoding images that can mean richer, deeper colors. With the beta version of Safari now on Windows, Mac OS X users aren't the only ones who'll be able to see the difference.
However, Apple won't keep that edge for long. Mozilla's forthcoming Firefox 3 browser, due to ship in beta form this July, likely will include support for richer color, said Vlad Vukicevic, a technical leader at Mozilla and a photo enthusiast.
Together, the moves could help boost the Internet beyond the orbit of the sRGB color scheme, a broadly supported but limited standard initially introduced by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. But it's not likely that Web photography will achieve sRGB escape velocity until the dominant Internet Explorer also follows suit.
A color test for browsers
People can see whether their browser properly supports color profiles by visiting an International Color Consortium Web page that shows a specially constructed image.
This first image tests whether your browser supports different ways of encoding color information. The four quarters of the image each are encoded with a different color profile: sRGB for the upper left, YCC-RGB for the upper right, GBR for the lower left and Adobe RGB for the lower right.
If your browser doesn't support International Color Consortium (ICC) color profiles, the scene looks like this.
If your browser supports ICC color profiles, the scene looks like this.
Credit: International Color Consortium
sRGB is fine for most people today, said Brad Hinkel, author of Color Management in Digital Photography and more recently a Microsoft project leader. But it doesn't encompass the full gamut of colors that the human eye can perceive or that can be displayed on the latest monitors.
"I've seen them. They're knock your socks off, intensely amazing--beautiful, vibrantly rich colors," Hinkel said. "Getting color management into Safari, into the browser and on the Internet is a great thing."
sRGB alternatives
Although the vast majority of images on the Web are encoded with sRGB, alternatives such as Adobe RGB, the European Color Intiaitive's ECI RGB and Microsoft's scRGB can display a broader palette of colors.
For now, there's little point employing the more sophisticated color schemes on the Web. IE, Firefox and Opera can't display them, and worse, Adobe RGB images, for example, typically look worse than sRGB on the Web. That's because the non-Safari browsers, incorrectly interpreting an Adobe RGB image as sRGB, drain the images of some of their color.
Not so with Safari. Apple machines are in widespread use among graphics professionals, and the operating system supports color encoding schemes that are called profiles and are standardized by a group called the International Color Consortium (ICC). Safari checks to see whether an image is tagged with a particular ICC color profile and displays it accordingly, tuned to work with the user's monitor.
While average Web surfers aren't likely to notice much of a difference, some professional photographers do care about the issue. For example, those selling images over the Web as stock art want them to look as good as possible, but they often encode their images as sRGB to make them appear better on the screens of potential purchasers.
People can see whether their browser properly supports color profiles by visiting an ICC Web page that shows a specially constructed image. With color support, the image appears to be a desert formation against a blue sky; without color support, it's a checkerboard of garishly distorted hues.
Color on computers is a complicated business, given the wide variety and near-infinite combinations of video cards, displays, printers, ink and cameras. ICC profiles can bring order to some of the chaos while preserving a bit more of the richness of color that human eyes can perceive.
See more CNET content tagged:
margin, Apple Safari, color, Adobe Systems Inc., Web browser
135 comments
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utilizes it.
Anywayz...
Better late than never, so whenever the *dominant* browsers add
this basic technology, I say "Welcome to the club".
:-)
Sounds great, but it's not going to make me switch to Safari. I don't take my flickr browsing THAT seriously. And, I'm not too keen on the idea of getting sucked into the world of 'Safari Standards'. (Mind you, I understand that the world of IE standards - or Mozilla standards for that matter - are no better in moral principal, but at least the majority of websites conform to them. That's worth something, if you ask me.)
That said, it's kind of cool that more people are made aware of it if they intend to build websites, so at least the idea of color coordination and visual appeal can be refined and clarified.
/P
It really doesn't matter what OS, what video card, or what the image is if the monitor you're working with isn't calibrated. I don't think people even KNOW they can calibrate them or how to do so. Geeks, sure, we know how to do it or that it can be done at all in the first place. The average user? I seriously doubt it.
to RGB difference, especially when an image is tagged with an
ICC profile.
I make my living in the field of color management and correction
for the book industry and often distribute tagged PDF files in
this manner.
This is a very important change for the business community in
terms of improving brand "look/feel" consistency in sales and
marketing efforts.
Even if inconsistencies exist between monitors (and they do)
OVERALL color fidelity is vastly improved and this is what
matters to business, creative and ecommerce clients.
For the average home user, it's true that this develop is a bit less
important.
Fix the window resize along the edges first....THAT is something you hear LOUD AND CLAER a lot.
What a joke....if Apple cant win....they create a new category to win in. Browser colors....dam that is lame.
Safari looks great, when it works... but this beta version is by far the worst of all beta version software that I put on my laptop. You can't really try it since it crashes most of the time and sometimes you get one text line information "Safari doesn't have information..." insted of page. This is more like alpha, I don't know why Apple did this in rush? Guys, your iPhone looks great, Safari also, take time and make it right.
BR,
Vladimir
incomplete software that's in a testing phase. lol
If they get that figured out (and decrease the overall memory footprint), I'll switch back. It is WAY faster than either IE or FF and looks nicer too.
experience is superior to your archaic XP or Vista.
While that won't be any more effective than what you're doing now, it WILL be much more entertaining for everyone else to watch.
In addition, speaking of colors - it's d-mn ugly! The color schema is a white dog on a Vista desktop.
If I wanted a Mac, I'd a bought one. I bought an Alienware Sentia running Vista; I'd like my browser not to be the thing that looks like an 'Alien'. Ugh.
Apple made the color scheme of Safari so hideous on Vista. I
installed it on my Vista partition, and it is just way too dark and
muddy looking, not nearly as light and clean as it looks in OS X. I
don't think it's just a matter of monitor calibration either.
Apple needs to make it look a lot nicer before bringing it out of
beta.
development, game production, book publishing, photo share and
printing sites, and sales, marketing and PR, there are many millions
of people across the world who care very much.
see things as they were intented? That attitude is quite telling.
Remember that every Mac user is so because they use or have used
Windows...basically there is no other reason. The whole experience
is something else on Macintosh. So if you like to bash Mac without
actually really using one and I don't mean piddling around with one
at BestBuy, then you have nothing to say about what sucks and
what doesn't. Ask any Mac user if they would go back to
Windows..."never!" is probably what you will hear.
Note: I know many more ex-Mac users than ex-Windows users, and I haven't known one to go back yet.
What if we find that your monitor isn't calibrated 100% accurate? Whose fault is that? I wouldn't be so quick to blame the OS or the video card or even the users of another OS. I might want to look at the monitor itself- or are you wiling to settle and call it 'good enough'?
This is a big deal to only a few users but it doesn't mean it's not needed, only that it's not going to be a huge improvement noticed by millions.
to RGB difference, especially when an image is tagged with an
ICC profile.
I make my living in the field of color management and correction
for the book industry and often distribute tagged PDF files in
this manner.
This is a very important change for the business community in
terms of improving brand "look/feel" consistency in sales and
marketing efforts.
A poor quality POS picture will *STILL* be a poor quality POS picture, but now in a few more colors that your eye can't detect and weren't in the original image file in the first place.
Perhaps if they introduce iSmell, then they can add something new. I must warn you though, some parts of the Net would need odor filters.
data.
JPG color space at 72 DPI is basically the same as the color space
of a JPG at higher resolutions. This is the value of JPG. Unless
the user reduces the color space, the color gamut remains very
close.
Therefore, this browser color change is still very relevant for
online shoppers, business professionals preserving brand
identity in proofing, book publishers, marketing and sales
professionals and for those in dental and medical imaging.
I know, I do this exact thing every day, 5 days a week.
And we are not talking "a few more colors here." This is a very
misleading generalization. Having an RGB color space tagged
with an ICC profile is a HUGE improvement over sRGB.
Huge.
Dan, your posts have matured and you have become a man of
facts: don't fail your evolution now by resorting to half educated
generalizations.
Dante
>> Mac browsers have been color manged (this is the term to use, btw C|Net) for years. Not just Safari. It's native to the OS, but it's also native for applications like Photoshop, Illustrators and others on PCs.
So, you really think that there's no color profile management on Windows, and applications like PhotoShop, Illustrators and others on non-Mac platforms, right?
I won't correct you, frankly. Your brain deserved to be manipulated by Steve Jobs.
OS X manages color on a system level and system wide with any application that is ICC profile aware. It can also communicate with devices like digital cameras and displays. If it is a digital display, OS X will create an acceptable profile for it. It can always be tweaked.
Take the time to understand how each OS handles color management and you will see the difference. They are working on a solution for Vista so that it can manage color better. Then you will probably see IE someday have the ability to read and understand color tags.
Even though we Mac users may be very ignorant, OS X is very smart.
the Adobe Suite and other Apps.
IE does not however.
Safari does.
If you understand color management, you know this to be true.
Reread the article.
why IE is better. Just face it Microsoft is dead. No one cares about
them any more. Its been knocked off its pedestal by a company
that gives a rip about usability vs. profit margins.
Safari for Windows seems to be doing just fine at reading and
commenting on this article.
that is causing the problems. I'm running Safari 3.0.1 on
Windows XP Pro SP2, on a Dell Latitude D820. 256MB of Video
RAM, 2 GB of RAM. Its a development box so I'm running all
kinds of other crap on it.
I'm having no issues with running it on my system. Are you
running the latest version of QuickTime? I don't think that
should make a difference, but I already had it installed on my XP
system and have not tried to install it on a system without
QuickTime.
I don't have a Vista box to test it out on. But I'm not surprised if
you have issues with it on Vista. Not because of Safari but
because of all the software compatibility issues I've heard Vista
has.
Just my two cents.
Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop.<p>I have had a couple of hangups,
but they have yet to reach the count of six yet. There
<i>are</i> bugs.<p>However, this is the first report I've heard
of transposed characters. The only way, what you to describe, to
even be possible, would for the text rendering engine to be
changing ASCII, and UNICODE bytes by one bit. This problem
would have been reported <i>universally</i>. Nice try,
however I cannot possibly know whether or not the rest of what
you said to be true.
It's not really the colors--they're show up okay. But at least from what I'm seeing, there's a lot of compression artifacts and blurriness. To be honest, it looks more like a badly color-profiled GIF image, than one with millions of colors.
So, based solely on what I'm seeing here, I don't see how this would be better than your typical sRGB JPEG.
the website they have divided it into four different images (the
quadrants) and applied different compression standards to each
quadrant.
Its not expected that the image would like perfect/flawless when
rendered in Safari just that the colors would render correctly.
Each compression algorithm is going to change the image
slightly. I think that some of these algorithms are going to look
better at different resolutions and are not intended to be blown
up to that large a scale.
Which makes sense because you don't want to load large images
into your web browser, at the same time you do not want to
lose the color quality and clarity when compressing the images
into smaller file sizes for the web.
The example is setup just to show how the color is preserved
using the different compression types. Keeping the image
sharpness and clarity falls under a different set of functionality.
I think that would make for a good store as to how well the
different compressions formats render in terms of sharpness,
clarity, and speed under Safari vs the other browsers.
However, Safari on windows is decent. Firefox will be better on the
crappy PC. I think that this was a bad idea on Apple's part by
releasing Safari for windows. Why not invest more time to make
Safari even better on the Mac, that way maybe people will switch,
bringing in the $$$$$$$$$$$$
platforms. They are making modifications in tandem with
Windows.
What is sad is that you all act like this is the first time Apple has
ever ported an application to Windows. They have had multiple
successes including AppleWorks, FileMaker Pro, QuickTime,
iTunes, and Bonjour for Windows. All of which seem to work
fine on Windows. Why do so many of you have so little faith that
the final product is going to be something good.
Nobody is asking you all to pay for it, or forcing you to download
it. You all act like Apple but a gun to your head and said
download it or else.
Instead of ******** you all should be thanking them for giving
you options, options that you don't have to pay for.
The reason I like is because it is so fast.
When I was using it outstripped FF an IE7 in terms of speed, and thats what brought me over to it.
statement: "limited gamut of a display" is completely in error.
So is your statement: "Adobe RGB is recognizing the printing
system has a wider gamut than the RGB display and is developed
to represent a better printed color space."
This is both not true -- RGB is not a printing space -- it is a
display space. CMYK is a printing space.
RGB is a monitor display profile and the gamut is different than
sRGB.
The Color Gamut of a display exceed, by a considerable margin,
the gamut of a display.
Look it up.
You are dead wrong.
The rendering and mapping of some of the home buttons are kind of a head scratcher.
I do applaud appple for finally releasing this cross platform, as so many other apps have done for years with the Mac OS.
I apologize for questioning the source of your information or if I sounded like I was attacking you personally. I'd like to put this all aside and treat you with respect.
What do you say?
Sure I agree and want to respect you as well.
I never intended any malice. Color management is just one of
my areas, Mac, PC, Online, or Print. Big part of what I do.
Was just trying to discuss color management usefulness in the
browser and its applications.
Never intended to disrespect you.
You submit many intelligent posts free from trolling and I
respect and appreciate that.
I apologize to you if I came across as disrespectful.
I am sorry.
Dante
(the original) and even setting up special pages for colorsync
support at mozilla.org
For some reason , nerds took over that project decided colorsync
is sort of fantasy and luxury and left that way. BTW, if you still
see GIF around,that is because same kind of nerds decided
animated images are uncool so advertisers simply stayed on GIF
instead of MNG.
It took 6 years , 3 browser incarnations to re-support colorsync
which was there, for free! 60 votes...
Now, lets wait 6 more years to get browser roaming back, yes..
Netscape 4 feature still not supported because some nerds think
it is not cool.