dull images in browser

[aldog]

Short:
My images look dull in my browser (firefox, camino, opera) but bright and beautiful in iphoto or preview.
*edit* it looks perfect in safari

Long:
I have a coppermine image gallery on my website that I upload all of my personal photos to, recently something happened that made me think the images were being compressed and losing quality when they were resized to 640x480, but I went and made my own 640x480 files with photoshop and put them on the site they still look somewhat dull.
So I moved over to my windows machine just to check and they look good on there, when I compare the 2 on the site to the originals there are no differences as far as I can tell.
Just wondering why this is, and if there's a way to fix it.

I have a macbook pro 15" w/ a glossy screen and OS 10.5.2
The other computer I looked at it on is a dell dimension 8300 (not sure if that matters) w/ a acer 22" widescreen monitor, windows xp sp2.

here's the image I'm comparing:
http://ad6storieshigh.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-50
although it's not specifically that one, that's just the one I chose.
(it's also attached so you can download and see if it looks the same in preview)

 

[karenflower]

Are you using Firefox 3? If so, type about:config in the address bar, and switch 'gfx.color_management.enabled' to true.

I did this a while back, and can't see any major differences in your image with Preview and Firefox.

 

[looking4anotebo]

Are you using Firefox 3? If so, type about:config in the address bar, and switch 'gfx.color_management.enabled' to true.

I did this a while back, and can't see any major differences in your image with Preview and Firefox.

What does switching it do exactly? Any potential problems or benefits?

 

[aldog]

I just edited my post to say that in safari the picture looks just as good as it does on iphoto.


karenflower
I use firefox 2 but I have firefox 3 beta 5 installed that I use every once in a while. I have it opened right now and I did as you suggested and it looks great! Thank you for solving my problem. I'm making it my default browser now.


I'm gonna second the question that looking4anotebo has. And do you, or anyone, know what other browsers have this "problem"? I'll have to go through a couple on my windows computer and see what other one's look like that.

just as a side note, myspace does decrease the quality, the reason that this question came up is that the person in that photo that's about to score posted one of the pictures on his myspace and I went to it and I was just thinking "wow, this looks like a little point and shoot camera took this picture". So I was going all over trying to fix it, reuploading the pictures, comparing them on all my monitors, good ol' karenflower's got my back though. But I just went and looked at the picture again, and it still looks kind of "ehhh" compared to the one in iphoto and the one in my gallery.​

 

[robbieduncan]

Your images in iPhoto and Preview are colour managed. In a browser (by default) they are not. There are good reasons for this as discussed by the WebKit team here.

 

[chrono1081]

Sounds like a color profile issue. I have no idea how to fix tis on a mac but I fix them on vista machines all the time. The preview will show up like crap but ms paint shows up normal.

 

[aldog]

Thanks for the link robbieduncan, sounds like a reasonable issue and good reason why it wouldn't be included, I guess I'll just have to keep in mind those 2 things and if they ever get too extreme I'll change the settings back


I found this while looking around as well.

We can check the value of gfx.color_management.enabled through the
gfxPlatform::IsCMSEnable() method.

If the gfx.color_management.enabled is true, Mozilla should call the
PNGGetColorProfile() method. But this method handles floating point
values.

Fortunately, Mozilla sets the value of gfx.color_management.enabled to
false as default. The PNGGetColorProfile() method is not called.
Nevertheless, the patch commented this part because a user may try to
set the value to true.
Anyway, the color management feature is not used basically now.

If Mobile Firefox should use the color management feature, the png
patch needs more tweaks as he said. ​