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One of these colors is not like the other
How can two Web browsers display the same graphic in different colors? They can’t — at least not until recently.
Color management, a term familiar to photographer and print graphic designers, is a forgotten art for many Web designers. Primitive low-resolution monitors limited early Web artists to a palette of 216 colors. Now, aside mobile devices, most users have high resolution monitors capable of handling millions of colors. A limited palette should no longer be an issue, but another issue emerges: The color profile you used to so lovingly turn out that graphic or photo won’t be recognized by most browsers.
Getting your perfectly tweaked photo to appear the same way on your Web site is challenging. I didn’t think about this until I began mocking a Web site for a friend’s wedding. A background image kept appearing a different shade in Safari versus Firefox and Internet Explorer. Imagine — a Web design problem not linked to IE.
Safari, as it turns out, has included color management since version 2.0. Firefox has it now, but you have to go through some trickery to get it to work right or download a plugin. A proposed future version of CSS will include the ability to specify color profiles.
Even with a profile specified for your graphic or photo, good luck matching it with the browser’s default implementation of CSS colors.
How did I solve my problem? I re-exported my graphics file from Photoshop with the ICC profile option unchecked. This turned my colors just the way I wanted to match the surrounding CSS colors — or at least I hope so. Even with the Web being able to display millions of colors, it still has a long way to go to display them right.
Before the plows come
Editor’s note: I like to sneak around places I shouldn’t, especially old buildings. Here is one of my latest, yet unfortunately infrequent, adventures.
A few months ago, Sara the girlfriend and I ventured over to her grandma’s childhood home and neighborhood to take pictures before it is bulldozed by Youngstown 2010, the former steel giant’s 21st century urban renewal plan.
Her grandma grew up on the city’s east side, actually in the southeastern corner in a neighborhood called Campbell (but pronounced “Camel” — don’t ask.) For those of you unfamiliar with Y-town geography, the city itself stretches farther north/south than east/west along the Mahoning River. Her grandma’s house was maybe two blocks away from the steel mills, so it looked something like this …
… 60 or 70 years ago. Most days the pollution wasn’t too bad, but if the wind blew the wrong way, women had to run out and grab their laundry so their linens wouldn’t turn black. Continue reading »