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.