Colour Shift when copying from web

[stimpy]

Long time Professional Mac user and this has always bugged me.

Why is there a shift in color when copying an image from the web to an application within OSX, be it mail, photoshop, pages.

The colour is always lighter and more washed out once pasted.

 

[macuserx86]

Depending on the browser (or application) you use, the handling of color can be drastically different.
Safari tends to make everything more saturated and punchy (it's not that simple, but you get the point) It looks at the images icc profile for gamma info, but not every browser does. This is the reason that PNGs look odd compared to CSS on websites.
Firefox has an add-on that lets you apply an .icc profile to the browser to make it render photos/graphics with a profile you select, but Safari has no such add on to my knowledge.

Color management is a crazy world that I still have a hard time understanding, even though I'm a pro photographer.