The appearance of images viewed on the web may vary considerably among different users due to many factors – including the monitor’s type, model and condition, monitor settings and calibration, ambient room light and the particular web browser being used.

Calibrated monitors are essential for rendering accurate color and brightness. Displays should be calibrated at 6500K (D65) white point and 2.2 gamma for optimum viewing of these images. For monitors that feature such adjustments, and for hardware (instrument) calibration, generally recommended luminance settings are 100 cd/m2 for CRT monitors and 120 cd/m2 for LCD monitors. For web purposes these images have been converted to IEC color profile sRGB IEC61966-2.1 and are tagged (color profile embedded).

All browsers compatible with PC’s and Windows interpret all web images by default as color profile sRGB (whether tagged or not) and will therefore function normally with this site.

For Macintosh Users:

For accurate color, Macintosh users should view this site with Safari, Firefox 3, OmniWeb 5.1.3 or Internet Explorer. These are the only browsers for Mac that support color management and detect available image color profiles. Except for Safari, the following should be noted:

Firefox 3: Firefox has supported color management in versions released since August 2007, but color management is off by default. To enable color management in Firefox enter the following (as a URL) into the address bar, typing exactly only: about:config

In the filter line enter the word color and locate near the bottom gfx.color_management.enabled. The preference is set by default to false. Double click on the word false, and it will change to true. Without making any other changes here quit Firefox and restart. More information is available in the first link below.

OmniWeb 5.1.3 (Mac): Color management is off by default. ColorSync® must be checked in OmniWeb> Preferences> Appearance> Use ColorSync.

Internet Explorer (Microsoft) (Mac): Color management is off by default. ColorSync® must be checked in Explorer> Preferences> Web Content> Use ColorSync. Microsoft Internet Explorer for Mac was discontinued in 2003 and has not been supported since 2005.

Other Mac browsers, including Opera and Camino, will display these images inaccurately – usually with a noticeable color cast and varying brightness. For some images, especially those with strong warm colors or darker tones, this may not be very obvious. However images with neutral colors or lighter tones, such as # N5 mentioned below, will clearly exhibit these aberrations.

Macintosh systems using the default 1.8 gamma will exhibit these images too bright. Images will appear to be “washed out” with missing highlight detail. Compared to the original images, colors will appear to be subdued and flat. Recalibrating at the above 6500K white point and 2.2 gamma, which Apple recommends for some imaging applications, will eliminate most of this distortion. The sRGB color profile included on Macs is not exactly the same as sRGB IEC61966-2.1 (which Photoshop installs), but the differences are very minimal and difficult to discern.

Additional information is available at the following links:
http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html
http://www.gballard.net/psd/srgbforwww.html
http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page1/
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302827
http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/02/14/this-is-your-mac-on-drugs/

To test the accuracy of any browser with Macintosh, download an image and open the file in Photoshop, Apple’s Preview or any other other color managed, image editing program. Image # N5 is a good example (Gallery I, top row). The color of the water will clearly reveal any difference in a side by side comparison of both image displays (browser and image editing). This is only pertinent for the images on this site and other web images which have embedded color profiles.