The fact that FF3 with CM enabled reads and uses your monitor’s profile is huge. Until this, FF (like IE etc) would just ignore the monitor profile. Now it renders colours the way their creators intended them to be seen. Forget embedded profiles, enjoy accurate managed colour in Windows.

I hesitate to mention it, but in Windows Vista at least, Safari does not deliver Colour Managed output - it does take note of embedded profiles, but it does not use the monitor’s profile at all. That was such a shame but there it is.

To my uneducated mind, it looks like FF is applying the screen profile to colours that don’t have their own profile (CSS and GIF) and the windows display driver is doing it again. Setting the display_profile to sRGB stops it doing that.

The solution, for now, is to convert your images to sRGB before uploading to flickr. It is a smaller gamut than AdobeRGB or whatever you happen to use in Photoshop, but that should never be noticeable (at least without a wide-gamut display as someone discussed above.)

This way, your photos should look identical on flickr and in photoshop, and more importantly, that’s what absolutely everyone else will see as well (besides the fact that most won’t have their monitors calibrated equally.)

If you’re using Lightroom, the Export dialog will convert to sRGB for you without touching your original. It’s a little more annoying in Photoshop (though there could be a better way) but is only a couple of extra clicks.

Of course, because not everyone does this, it could still be worth using the FF3 color profile option to ensure that you see other photos on flickr they way the photographer sees them.

Like your Flickr set!

But, instead of all on, or all off (default), a 3rd option should have been explored and that is to perform color management on images that have ICC profiles embedded in them. There aren’t many such images on the internet, but those people who have embedded profiles have usually done so for a reason and this metadata should be honored. This is how Safari works. PNG and JPEG support ICC profiles, GIF does not. TIFF does as well but rarely used on the internet.

Case in point, I find it unfortunate that FF3 which has this capability built into it now, completely disregards embedded ICC profiles in images, so they actually display incorrectly. Example: http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter

The issue of color management on all platforms is an increasing problem. In the past, we could assume average displays had nearly sRGB like behavior, and target images and web content to that color space. Of course this is a slight problem on the Macintosh were its tone reproduction curve is defined by gamma 1.8 instead of gamma 2.2 like on other systems. But a much bigger problem than this, an one that affects all platforms, is that display technologies are diverging from sRGB rather than converging on it. We already have affordable wide-gamut displays, that once were in the $10000 range now in the $1400 range, and this will get even lower.

So it’s good this functionality is in FF3. Really the primary hold out is Flash. Once that’s color managed, then everything can be, without surprises.