Since your hero last blogged I had some visitors, traveled to a destination wedding in Bermuda, moved to a different state, and I’m sure some other blog-worthy things…none of which will be discussed today! No, first I have something much more exciting… a short word on color profiles!

Super high level overview: Color profiles basically tell your computer how to output images for a certain device – be it your monitor, you printer, etc. Beyond that, they are also software dependent – most browsers only support the sRGB color profile.

Now you may be wondering why I’m talking about all this. I might even say this is embarassing considering the thousands of hours I’ve probably spent using Photoshop… I realized a couple months ago that I’ve been saving and uploading all of my photos to the web with the Adobe RGB color profile and I’ve been doing it for more than two years (approximately 700 photos). Why did I do this? Well Adobe RGB was set as the default color profile in the Photoshop “Camera Raw” plug-in that I used when processing my photos.

What happens when you view an Adobe RGB image with software that only does sRGB? Basically it sucks the life out of your image. Colors are dulled and people are turned into zombies. On some photos it’s not that noticable…on others it’s definitely noticable.

Here are two screen shots from a browser that only supports sRGB. The left photo is sRGB, the right is Adobe RGB. Can you see a difference? I think it looks like my skin is going to fall off in the right photo (both due to the jowling and the grayish hue).

After a few marathon sessions spanning a couple months, I’ve finally finished replacing all of my flickr photos with sRGB versions! Huzzah! Lesson learned. I imagine in a couple years that this won’t be a big deal – some browsers already support multiple profiles, and hopefully that trend spreads.