Comments on: Why Your Pictures Look Dull in Firefox

By: AMy

AMy — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:31:56 +0000

i found that i apply an adjustment layer >hue/saturation on top of an image with color profile srgb. I up the levels until it looks over saturated on screen (but not a complete mess).

When viewing in photoshop i cringe- but when i see it in IE, Safari and Firefox it is dulled down some but counter acts the over saturation down in photoshop.

After a couple of tries i can now eyeball it and know it will look good in a browser.

By: Of Zen and Computing

Of Zen and Computing — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 17:34:38 +0000

Thanks for offering your advice Kevin.

My ultimate point is converting a JPEG to sRGB rather than a color space such as Adobe RGB is going to give you much better results, which really only applies to those who are creating or editing their own images from scratch.

So yes, a JPEG that comes straight out of a point & shoot digital camera will most likely already be in sRGB. In that case the discrepancy you are seeing is much less severe than if you were using an entirely different color space.

By: Kevin Canini

Kevin Canini — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:09:21 +0000

I’m glad people are writing about this annoying problem. However, the author is completely wrong about why this is happening. It’s not that Firefox doesn’t understand embedded color profiles. It’s that Firefox doesn’t convert images to the display device’s color space before outputting them. That’s why converting to sRGB doesn’t fix the problem, Megan. In fact, nearly all JPG images are already in the sRGB color space, so the author’s recommended fix actually won’t change them.

To get Firefox to display images properly, you have to convert them to the smallest possible color space, i.e., your display device’s color space. For my MacBook Pro, that would be “Color LCD”. Although you will be losing some of the dynamics of the image’s color, it will be displayed as correctly as possible on your monitor.

By: Of Zen and Computing

Of Zen and Computing — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:31:20 +0000

What is the source of your pictures? Are they straight from the camera, or have you adjust them? What type of monitor do you have? Is it color calibrated?

Is there any difference at all? This is not going to make them perfect, but it does serve as an improvement. You will still see a small discrepancy between browsers.

By: Megan

Megan — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:39:26 +0000

I followed the directions of this via Photoshop EXACTLY and it did NOT work. It is driving me crazy! My colors look absolutely awful. I don’t know how to fix it!

By: Neil

Neil — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 11:28:45 +0000

Good post. This has greatly improved the color for one of my photos in Firefox, however it’s still duller than safari.

While investigating this problem, I found out that in photoshop you can preview how Firefox will render the image by selecting: View > Proof Setup > Monitor RGB

By: Make your pictures Firefox-ready using Automator at The Joy of Scripting

Make your pictures Firefox-ready using Automator at The Joy of Scripting — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 11:25:09 +0000

[...] The website Of Zen and Computing just published an interesting article about dull looking pictures in Firefox and how to avoid this phenomenon by adding a specific color profile to your pictures before uploading them to the web. [...]

By: Of Zen and Computing

Of Zen and Computing — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 05:07:36 +0000

Excellent point, Asa. This is one of those problems that may seem simple at first glance, but is quite the tangled web underneath.

By: Asa Dotzler

Asa Dotzler — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 22:20:19 +0000

Firefox will support color profiles in version 3 but there’s still a problem. There are millions (billions?) of pages out there where the page author has matched her image content with her css colors. If Firefox enables color profile support, most, if not all of those sites will have visual problems where the images don’t match up to their background colors. Then there’s the cross-browser problem. If those sites tune their css colors to match their images in Firefox and Safari, then the sites will look wrong in IE. It’s going to be a while before all of this is sorted out.

- A