Color Management

I have always been wondering why people were often unimpressed or had strange comments about the images I churned out. At first I assumed it was a matter of monitor calibration, though it is quite rare for monitors to be wildly out of calibration. Basically, what looked great on my monitor did not look terribly good on theirs.

Then I remembered the color profiles inherent in my pics, and the simple fact that most users simply did not use color management. While it is indeed possible for me to display gamut in Photoshop and tweak each individual image to suit the color profiles of most other users, that would involve a lot of effort on my part and completely throw off the color accuracy of my prints. After re-enabling color management on Firefox, the issue was resolved and my colors displayed correctly again.

When I do set up a site to get my pics marketed, the first thing I would do is provide a tutorial for users to enable color management on their browsers such that all images would appear as they are intended. On a side note, it is also pretty remarkable how much more sensitive I was to "off" colors in my food than I was with most of my other pictures. Indeed, slightly different colors for landscape shots went largely unnoticed, and did not really require any tweaking. For food, however...the difference in the reds determines the line between yum and yuck.