Pictures colors too dark in Firefox

Since I reinstalled from scratch, pictures appear very dark in Firefox.

I checked the stream of "featured pictures" on the frontpage of Flickr. Under Chromium, those are high-quality beautiful pictures. Under Firefox, the sames pictures are ridiculously saturated, with colors that no photographer could accept. Just one example:

enter image description here

Is it intended?
Is there a trick to fix colors in Firefox?

(Using version Minefield 4.2a1pre on Ubuntu 2010.10)

Nicolas Raoul

Posted 2011-04-14T03:08:56.080

Reputation: 7 766

Might be related to this: http://www.hfgf.org/facebook.html This page's lower image shows very differently in Chromium and Firefox 4.

– Nicolas Raoul – 2011-04-14T03:12:39.630

Belated April Fools? – user541686 – 2011-04-14T03:12:54.403

Answers

Most likely, Firefox 4 is using a different style of color management that is making your images look different.

If it's bothering you, you might want to take a look at the Color Management add-on - with this, you can set the color management to no images, all images, or just images with embedded ICC tags.

For a brief explanation of color correction in Firefox, take a look at ICC color correction in Firefox. It refers to the change from Firefox 2 to 3, but it shows how color management profiles can affect image color.

Although support for color correction was introduced in Firefox 3, it was disabled by default, requiring some tinkering about in the about:config window to enable it. Firefox 3.5 addresses the issues that caused it be disabled by default in the previous version, and now images with International Color Consortium (ICC) tagging are, by default, color corrected.

The image below is split into three sections. The top left corner shows the image as rendered by Firefox 2. The top right corner shows how the image renders in Firefox 3. The bottom shows the image rendered in Photoshop.

As you can see, Firefox 3 and Photoshop render the image identically, because both support the embedded color correction profile. Firefox 2 ignores the profile, resulting in mismatched color.

Jared Harley

Posted 2011-04-14T03:08:56.080

Reputation: 11 692

1Indeed, disabling ICC solves the problem. But why would all the photographers on Flickr upload pictures with horrible colors? Because they don't know about ICC yet? There must be another problem. Meanwhile, here is how to disable ICC: Go to about:config and set "gfx.color_management.mode" to 0. – Nicolas Raoul – 2011-04-14T06:06:05.190

It is probably this Firefox bug:

The new QCMS color management system introduced in Firefox 3.5 currently only supports ICC version 2 color profiles, not version 4. This may result in images being too dark. See bug 488800

Nicolas Raoul

Posted 2011-04-14T03:08:56.080

Reputation: 7 766