Firefox color annoyance
Going through the latest set of photographs I'd got as far as uploading one, when I looked at it in Firefox on my iBook. It seemed rather washed out compared to how it had looked in Lightroom and (I quickly found) also compared to Preview and Safari.
The screenshot should give some idea of the difference:
The image is an sRGB JPEG; that is to say, the relationship between the numeric values and actual light frequencies is that defined by a standard called sRGB. This is what's expected for the web, to the point that most web browsers reportedly ignore embedded color profiles and assume sRGB; which makes it unlikely that Firefox was misinterpreting the JPEG.
However it was managing to misdisplay it. Next I compared the color profile of my display with sRGB, using Apple's handy tool to do so.
The colorful part of the image represents the gamut of the color LCD profile (i.e. the range of possible colors it can display). The white region around it represents the gamut of sRGB. As you can see there's quite a difference. So if the theory is that Firefox is displaying as if the display was sRGB even when it isn't, what result would we expect? Well, the effect would be that the gamut of the image itself is compressed; which is what we see.
It's a bit of a disappointment that Firefox bypasses the local color management stuff, though also a shame that it's convenient for it to do so. The upshot is that Firefox is not really suitable for displaying color images given the spread of LCDs (for anybody, not just for the producers of images).
(It happens to look fine under Linux Firefox on a system with a CRT. I did a similar comparison between sRGB and the color profile I determined for said CRT last time the Mac was connected to it, and they are very nearly identical. Which explains why the image looks fine under Linux Firefox.)