Safari introduces better browser colours

Safari may not be rewriting the rules for Web browsing on Windows just yet, but it's leading the way with one significant change: photographs with better colour.

Unlike the prevailing browsers on the Internet, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox, the Apple browser supports different ways of encoding images that can mean richer, deeper colours. With the beta version of Safari now on Windows, Mac OS X users now aren't the only ones who'll be able to see the difference.

Apple, however, won't keep that edge for long. Mozilla's forthcoming Firefox 3 browser, due to ship in beta form this July, is likely to include support for richer colour, said Vlad Vukicevic, a technical leader at Mozilla and a photo enthusiast.

Together, the moves could help boost the Internet beyond the orbit of the sRGB colour scheme, a broadly supported but limited standard initially introduced by HP and Microsoft. But it's not likely Web photography will achieve sRGB escape velocity until the dominant Internet Explorer also follows suit.

sRGB is fine for most people today, said Brad Hinkel, author of Color Management in Digital Photography and more recently a Microsoft project leader. But it doesn't encompass the full gamut of colours that the human eye can perceive or that can be displayed on the latest monitors.

"I've seen them. They're knock your socks off, intensely amazing -- beautiful, vibrantly rich colours," Hinkel said. "Getting colour management into Safari, into the browser and on the Internet is a great thing."

sRGB alternatives
Although the vast majority of images on the Web are encoded with sRGB, alternatives such as Adobe RGB, the European Color Intiaitive's ECI RGB and Microsoft's scRGB can display a broader palette of colours.

For now, there's little point employing the more sophisticated colour schemes on the Web. IE, Firefox and Opera can't display them, and worse, Adobe RGB images, for example, typically look worse than RGB on the Web. That's because the non-Safari browsers, incorrectly interpreting an Adobe RGB image as sRGB, drain the images of some of their colour.

Not so with Safari. Apple machines are in widespread use in graphics professional circles, and the operating system supports colour encoding schemes, called profiles and standardised by a group called the International Color Consortium (ICC). Safari checks to see if an image is tagged with a particular ICC colour profile and displays it accordingly, tuned to work with the user's monitor.

While average Web surfers aren't likely to notice much of a difference, some professional photographers do care about the issue. For example, those selling images over the Web as stock art want them to look as good as possible, but they often encode their images as sRGB to make them appear better on the screens of potential purchasers.

People can see if their browser properly supports colour profiles by visiting an ICC Web site that shows a specially constructed image. With colour support, the image appears to be a desert formation against a blue sky -- without it, it's a checkerboard of garishly distorted hues.

Colour on computers is a complicated business, given the wide variety and near-infinite combinations of video cards, displays, printers, ink and cameras. ICC profiles can bring order to some of the chaos while preserving a bit more of the richness of colour human eyes can perceive.