4K iMac -Colors much more saturated on Chrome?

[ThisBougieLife]

I just bought a Retina 4K 21" iMac from a friend. One thing I noticed is that colors are much brighter and more saturated on Google Chrome vs. Safari (an easy way to see the difference is to just look at the Google home-page. The red letters in the word "Google" are noticeably brighter on Chrome). Why is this?

I never noticed this on the rMBP I had. This must be something to do with the P3 color gamut, right? Is this a known Chrome issue? Just wondering.

The two browsers even handle this banding test differently: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php and probably some of the other tests on that site.

 

[maflynn]

I have a 5k iMac, so it may not apply, but I cannot for the life of me, dicern any difference between Safari and Chrome for that page. Everything looks identical to my untrained eyes.

 

[ThisBougieLife]

I realize I may be more sensitive to this kind of thing, but I swear I'm not crazy

Here's a picture:

Above is from Chrome, lower is from Safari. Tell me the colors don't look brighter in the top logo.

 

[sartrekid]

I have the same result with the 5k iMac:

 

[ThisBougieLife]

Okay, I think I know what's going on here:

Chrome does not display things in "P3", it displays them in sRGB. When I went under System Preferences and switched the color profile to sRGB, I was able to get the over-saturated colors in Safari. Switching back to the default (i.e. P3) caused the colors in Safari to switch back to the less-saturated ones, but made no difference in Chrome.

 

[CPx]

This is one of the foibles of using the new wide-gamut Macs. You got to deal with oversaturation issues for apps that aren't color-managed correctly. This includes Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Safari works pretty well. The exception is full-screen video in Safari can be hit and miss. Netflix and Youtube look good in full-screen, but Hulu, HBO Now, and many other random embedded video players (usually Flash-based, in my experience) will oversaturate when viewed full-screen. It's pretty annoying.

If Apple starts adopting wide-gamut displays on new Macbooks (I wouldn't be surprised if they do.. the 9.7 iPad Pro already has wide-gamut), more and more people will feel the pain until developers get this under control. But at the moment I don't think people are paying much attention. There's been a bug open with Firefox about this for months.

Anyway if you google for browser color management, you'll find several websites that explain what's happening better than I can.

 

[maflynn]

I realize I may be more sensitive to this kind of thing, but I swear I'm not crazy

Here's a picture:

Above is from Chrome, lower is from Safari. Tell me the colors don't look brighter in the top logo.

There seems to an almost imperceptible difference, not enough imo to really be worked up over, and it could be justified by how chrome renders images as opposed to safari.

 

[CPx]

There seems to an almost imperceptible difference, not enough imo to really be worked up over, and it could be justified by how chrome renders images as opposed to safari.

It's not a big deal for graphic design elements, but it's more of a problem in images and video of people. Skin tones get rather unpleasant.

 

[redheeler]

Same with Firefox on my 5K iMac. These apps are probably forcing rendering in sRGB which makes it look oversaturated on a P3 display.