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.

Lightroom

I've recently purchased Lightroom and I am impressed.

I've avoided this product in the past for various reasons. During it's year long beta period, I was too busy with other projects. When it sent on sale, I was reluctant to spend the money ($299 USD) or, more importantly, take the time to learn a new tool.

After some interesting comments from other photographers, I finally decided to take the plunge.

Now if you are not fluent on digital workflow and what it means, I suggest you go out and read Peter Krogh's The DAM book immediately. As a professional photographer, digital workflow is almost as important as light.

It's hard to describe what lightroom does, as it covers multiple areas of your workflow. So, I'll simply explain by showing how I'm using it in my own workflow.

Priot to lightroom, I used imageinjesterpro to load my photos from memory cards or external disks after a shoot. This task would:

• Copy the files to my local disk and a backup disk (I always have two copies)
• Rename the files according to my naming convention
• Store them in a file folder by date of the shoot
• load my default metadata
  

Afterwards, I would use Adobe Bridge to rate, keyword, and perform general editing of the pictures. Finally I converted my raw files (I only shoot raw) to DNG and update my photolibrary. Iview Pro (now Media Expression) managed my photo library.

Now.....

Lightroom imports my files from cards or external disks, renames them, applies my default metadata and processing, copies them to two locations and converts them to DNG in one step. It also runs in the background, so I can do other things while this happens.

As an added plus, it will read the XMP files that my Epson P-5000 creates, so I can rate work in the field without having to redo it when I get home.

Lightroom has replaced Imageinjester Pro.

Iview Pro was beginning to slow down with my library size, while lightroom keeps going strong. I can also directly edit work with non-destructive editing , white balance, etc. It can also apply my default processing to images as they are loaded, so I can often skip this step for creating proofs.

Lightroom has replaced Iview Pro (Media Expression) and Adobe Bridge.

As well, I can resize, remove dust spots, print, and export to different formats (such as jpgs).

All and all, Lightroom has replaced three core applications in my workflow (Iviewpro, imageinjester, and Bridge) with more efficiency and more options.

If you haven't taken a look at Lightroom, I recommend you download the 30-day free trial. It's well worth your time. If you are a member of EP, ASMP, or some of the other professional groups, you can even get a discount on the purchase price.

- Scott -