Color Management in Firefox 3

Live and In Color!

Colour management is a critical issue for all professional photographers. We invest significant time and money in equipment to create proper profiles of our monitors, printers, projectors, and even the cameras themselves.

Unfortunately, one of the largest populations of viewers of our work has been unable to take advantage of this investment in color management. That group would be web users, who are often viewing our website and work online. Without color management, we are helpless against the color errors on the audiences monitors.

Now, with an embedded profile, the data is there to display the colors correctly (as defined by the photographer and their equipment). Until now, web browsers simply ignored this data and used whatever default profile they considered correct.

Until now.

I recently discovered that Firefox 3 has enabled color management. It's not well documented and not easy to find, but you can turn it own.

Here's how:

1) enter about:config in the URL bar (BTW, this bar has a LOT more functionality than you would expect)

2) Click through the warning. Basically, you can fubar yourself nicely if you randomly change items here.

3) look up gfx.color_management.enabled (use the search function, as it's much easier)


4) The default is false (no idea why,as it only uses a different profile when it finds it). Right click and set it to true.


5) Restart Firefox and see the colors as the work's creator intended.



Hopefully, the next version of Firefox will have this on by default and other browsers will start following this example.

No Contest

.....that includes a rights grab

Photography contests are wide spread and very popular for both amateur and professionals alike.

For the amateur it's a chance to measure themselves against their peers and see just how good they really are at photography. For the professional, it's much the same thing, but also an excellent tool to distinguish yourself from the other shooters in the market. It becomes one more credential and a means to get noticed. Many a mailing to clients has begun with the announcement of a contest win.

Most photography contests are well run, serious, and fair. Unfortunately, this is not the case for all of them. There is a rising a subtle trend in photography contests that has developed almost unnoticed. Almost, but not quite, as many of the professional organizations have started warning their members of this threat.

Threat? What threat? Well, some of these contests have some interesting clauses relating to rights and permissions. Now every contest needs to promote itself and often does so by using the work of previous winners. . All contests have an entry rule that grants the contest management the right to use the work of entrants for self promotion. They need this rule to operate and everyone benefits. The contest can promote itself and the winners and runner-ups get the attention they deserve.. No problem here.

The problem happens when these rules include the permission to use winners work for any purpose at all. This permission often includes being able to license it for any purpose, including advertising and even to third-parties.

What this means in simple terms is the contest management can use your work as part of their own picture library and license it to anyone and everyone. I've even seen contest rules that prevent the photographer from licensing their work themselves without permission. In other words, they own every photograph entered into their contest - and they often charge $10 for each entry. This means that the poor people entering these contests have actually paid to have their work stolen from them.

This is not an isolated event or a particular contest. It's happened in quite a few and not just contests for amateurs , even some professional contests have tried this nonsense. Of course, smart professional photographers belong to professional organizations, such as the PPA (Professional Photogtrapher's of America), ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers, and others. These groups represent thousands of professionals and can bring a lot of attention to something that affect us.

These groups and others have notified their members repeatedly of these rights-grabbing contests and even managed to get some very high profile contests to adjust their rules correctly.

So....read the contest rules carefully before you enter and if you think they are asking for more rights than the contest self-promotion, decline to enter. There are plenty of well managed contests you can enter. Voting with your feet and your dollars will help drive these unfair contests to either be fair or be gone.