Color Profiles

We’ve had many questions regarding color profiles and the confusion that comes with managing and displaying them on the web. Many browsers don’t support color profiles, so when you upload your photos the profile isn’t displayed and the colors often look washed out and dull. To get around this problem at Parade we manage the conversion on our server. When you upload a photo we will apply the profile to the photo so it will look the same in all browsers, whether the browser can display color profiles or not.

Instructions for uploading photos with color profiles

Note: we will convert your photo to display on your Parade site as sRGB (see screen shots below)

Save your photos from your favorite editor as sRGB, Adobe RGB or Pro Photo RGB
Upload your photos.

Results:

We recommend uploading your photos with the sRGB profile. As you can see sRGB profile will give you the closest match to the original, followed by Adobe RGB and then Pro Photo RGB.

Any profiles outside of these three may give unpredictable and/or undesirable results!

Further reading:

Browsers that support color profiles:

Apple’s Safari for Mac (Assumes monitor profile on untagged files)
Apple’s Safari for Windows XP Windows VISTA (Vista Assumes sRGB on untagged files)
Mozilla’s FireFox (Mac and Windows)

Note: Color management in FireFox3 is off by default. TO ENABLE COLOR MANAGEMENT: type about:config into the address bar. Scroll to the value of gfx.color_management.enabled, set it to true and restart the browser.