Are you aware that when you “Save for Web & Devices” in Photoshop, the software might strip out the colour profile? Unless you check the “Embed Color Profile” box when saving out a jpeg to preserve ICC profiles in the Save for Web & Devices dialog. In versions prior to Photoshop 7 you do not have this option which means that, when using the option “Save for the web” there will not be any ICC-profile embedded.
I’m not sure why this “Embed Color Profile” was implemented in Photoshop at a later versions, since there are still not much browsers will read in this embedded ICC profile, even if the colour profile is embedded in the image, most browsers will just simply ignore the embedded color space information and render them as sRGB images. sRGB is pretty much the default color space everywhere you look. This means that most browsers, applications, and devices are designed to work with sRGB, and assume that images are in the sRGB color space.
However, notable exceptions are Safari, starting with version 2.0, and Firefox starting with version 3.0. Although disabled by default in Firefox 3.0, users can enable color management by using an add-on or setting the value “gfx.color_management.enabled” to “true” in Firefox 3′s “about:config” file. Starting from Firefox 3.5 it has color management enabled by default only for tagged images.
So, the first question is should we still embed ICC profile in images, regardless of the little support for colour profile in web browsers? Please bear in mind that the extra ICC profile will probably increase the image size by a few more bytes (sounds pretty ok, but imagine you have tons of images or very large images required to be downloaded). For myself, since the first day I started using “Save for Web & Devices” option, I do not embed the ICC profile for all web images. Hopefully, in the near future more browsers could consider implementing this ICC profile function, to make colour accuracy better on screen.
Another question I have is, when should we convert images to sRGB? I guess that should depend where will you be using the images for, is it for web or print? If you want your images to look the same regardless of where it’s being displayed, you should always publish them as sRGB. This makes it so what you see when you save is what you get when it’s displayed. It helps to simplifies the workflow, and you do not need to worry about color spaces at all if you’re only going to publish your images to your Flickr or personal photoblog.
However, for myself, I do not convert it to sRGB, I would still prefer to work under the Adobe RGB colour space, as it can offer a wider range of colours, and who knows in the near future, I would require those wider range of colours. Please note that, once you have converted the images to sRGB, you cannot convert it back to Adobe RGB.
For now, the choices is really up to oneself, but I do hope that one day the web browsers can really reach up to a more consistent colour standards, thus lessening the burden on designers, as well as providing the best experience for any web surfers who really deserve it.
What is ICC Profile and sRGB?
ICC Profile – Wikipedia
sGRB – Wikipedia
2 Comments » 
Share 
Design, Web Technologies
so if you save for web an image worked on in AdobeRGB color space, would it get converted over to sRGB while being saved or stay an AdobeRGB (to be displayed in Firefox 3.5)?
Hi Mike, Yes it will still convert to sRGB by default. If you do not want this option, you can uncheck it in the ‘Save for Web’ dialog box.