Archive
This is your Mac on drugs
Why the web can look wonky on a Mac by Chris MacAskill, President of SmugMug
The PC is a soldier. When Direktor Gates demands color #e3823c, PC responds “Sir, Yes Sir!!” Color #e3823c looks identical on the PC whether it’s in a JPEG, GIF, PNG, CSS, or HTML.
The only colors Direktor Gates tolerates are found in the box of crayons called sRGB. Internet standards like HTML, CSS and Flash march in step with the same colors.
The Mac Thinks Different. Color #e3823c is different on Macs. Except sometimes*.
If you have a Mac with Safari, check out this wonkiness (if you don’t, here’s a screen shot). Now check the page with Firefox. It looks completely different than it does in Safari, and different from Firefox and Internet Explorer on the PC.
Why this is a big deal:
Most people don’t have light-controlled rooms with color-calibrated monitors. I don’t, and you probably don’t, either. Almost everyone will see your photos slightly differently than the next person. We’re not talking about perfect color precision here, because on the net, that’s an impossibility.
What *is* important, though, is for your photo to match the rest of the page. If you’ve selected a background on a PC to match the blue in your subject’s eyes, you don’t want background and eyes to be mismatched on a Mac. Or your photo to look different in some Mac web browsers than it does in Photoshop.
Yet this is exactly what’s happening. And the fix is simple.
Demystifying the wonk:
#1: Macs ship with a display gamma of 1.8. The word gamma was probably chosen to make it sound like nuclear physics, but it’s fairly simple. It’s a setting, like brightness or contrast, that adjusts your image. Halfway between black & white (midtones) the changes are greatest; they change less as the colors get darker or lighter.
If you’re a mime with white makeup and black clothes, photos of you on the Internet will look similar on Macs and PCs. But if you’re gorgeously mid-toned, you’ll lose some of your tan on a Mac. Except sometimes*.
Internet standards, including HTML, CSS, and Flash, are based on a gamma of 2.2, making colors partway between black & white appear darker and higher contrast than 1.8 gamma makes them appear. Examples.
#2: Some Mac browsers (IE, Safari and Omniweb) go part way in preserving the artist’s intent: if you know what an ICC profile is, you can attach it to your photo and the Mac will render your photo with a gamma of 2.2. Then it will look like it does in Photoshop on your Mac, or on the Internet on PCs.
There are three problems:
- Safari still won’t know to adjust the rest of the page, such as borders drawn in CSS or background colors specified in HTML, leaving you with color mismatches like you saw on the wonkiness page.
- Other Mac browsers like Camino, Opera and Firefox don’t know for ICC profiles. The good news is they don’t get color mismatches. The bad news is nothing on the page matches your intent. (Except sometimes*.)
- Very few photos on the web have ICC profiles because they slow down browsing, especially on thumbnail-sized images. In this case, Safari doesn’t render them with a gamma of 2.2 unless your monitor is set to 2.2.
#3: PNG images have their own issues with Safari, unless they’re specially prepared, as you saw near the bottom of the wonkiness page. Read it and weep.
What’s this ‘except sometimes’?
If your Mac’s gamma is already at 2.2, you’re golden. Unfortunately, this is rare. Macs ship with a default gamma of 1.8, even though Apple recommends you and your friends change your gamma to 2.2. Here’s what they say:
If you calibrate your monitor with a Huey, for example, you’ll be asked what you do with your Mac. If you answer photo editing and web surfing, it will quietly set your gamma to 2.2 to make web pages match the artists intent. The good news: theoretically, now web pages look the same in Firefox & Safari — and on the PC. Photos look the same as they do in Photoshop. And in print. Color mismatches disappear.
In practice, devices like the Huey are not 100% accurate and the calibration they provide is influenced by the room’s lighting. So if you’re using Safari, you’ll probably notice that color mismatches will be reduced but not gone on the wonkiness page.
If you want to see almost no mismatches on the wonkiness page, go to Apple > System Preferences > Displays > Color > and pick sRGB IEC61966-2.1. Then quit Safari and restart it. Now everything should be as it is on a PC except the PNG may not match perfectly. It will match in Firefox.
What would Photoshop do?
If your monitor is set to the factory default, Photoshop is between a rock and hard place. It knows to display your photo with a gamma of 2.2 because it’s smart. But how should it preview your photo when you choose Save for Web? It has no idea. Will you be viewing your photo in Firefox or Safari? Will you be seeing it with an ICC profile or without? On a Mac or PC? It can’t know.
So by default it plays the odds and takes its chances: you’ll probably end up viewing it on a Mac and since few photos on the web have ICC profiles, it shoots the crap and renders the photo the way your monitor is set, with a gamma of 1.8. Tens of thousands of photographers are tormented by the shift in color they see between an open photo in Photoshop and the save for web preview they see of the same photo right beside it, and they wonder why Photoshop is so wonky.
If you set your monitor to sRGB IEC61966-2.1, that color shift goes away.
What should Steve do?
It seems to me…that artists and photographers want their admirers to see the web the way they intended, which they would if Mac browsers used a gamma of 2.2 for everything on the page.
I worked for Steve’s company in the NeXT days so I can understand the dilemma. High-end publishers standardized on 1.8 gamma before consumers seized the web. But publishers understand words like gamma, ICC profiles, and calibration. Try saying gamma to a consumer. They just want the web to look right.
As it is, companies like Pantone are deciding for Steve to set the gamma at 2.2 with their Hueys. Except sometimes*.
And let’s not forget that Apple already recommends changing the gamma to 2.2 after you buy your Mac.
Why not ship OS X with gamma at 2.2 and say farewell, wonkiness?
UPDATE: The story gets worse. 😦 Turns out the right sRGB profile isn’t included by default on the Mac, so you can’t fix things yourself without some outside help. Photoshop installs it for you automatically, as do some other apps. You can download the right profile here and stick it in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles yourself to fix things up.
Google – Please please please support email aliases!
If anyone from Google is reading this, please, hear my plea!
I, like many people, have more than one email address. One for work, one for home. It’s nice to keep them separate. I’m sure you know what I mean.
I also like to use Google’s services, such as Calendar or Docs. Since I use multiple computers, it’s nice to have stuff centralized out on the net. I’ve wanted this for decades.
But my friends & co-workers don’t always know which email address to send meeting invitations or document permissions to. So I get a Calendar invite or a Docs link, and click on it, and I’m greeted with “Sorry, you don’t have permission to use this.” WTF? I clicked on the unique link in my email, and I’m already logged into Google, what do you mean I don’t have access? Oh, duh, they used my personal email address instead of my work email address. Crap.
So I’m left with two choices: Just not interact with Google on this particular event or document (most likely) or email the party back and ask them to resend (least likely).
Please, Google, let me add email aliases (yes, verify that I actually own them first) to my Google Account so all your services will recognize me from my multiple email addresses. Pretty please? With a cherry on top?
Oh, and it’d be nice if our years-old application to Google Apps for Your Domain was accepted too, but that seems to have gone into the void. Doh.
I don't wear manfume. Do you?
Fantastic web marketing. Bruce Campbell is still my hero. Easily the funniest “online test” I’ve ever taken, complete with references to everything from DOOM to Jimmy Wales.
Man, I wish I was smart enough to come up with something this clever.
Find Jim Gray using the power of the web
I’ll make this short and sweet: A ton of great people from lots of great companies teamed up and managed to get satellite and aircraft imagery up on Amazon so that you, and everyone you know, can quickly and easily help sift through and help in the search.
You can help find Jim Gray. Go now.
You can also read more here if you’re curious about the heroic efforts behind this part of the search.
Make video more consumable
As a follow-up to my last post about video online, which was in turn related to the post about Scoble and linking before that, here’s my take on how video online could improve:
I was struck by how much I enjoyed reading Scoble’s rundown of what was in his Intel video. He even included some timestamps of some interesting bits, so you could skip right to it if you’d like. IMHO, this is a step in the right direction. What I’d *really* like to see is yet another step: chapters as separate entities with good, short summaries.
I’d love to see video with great content (I don’t think anyone’s debating whether Scoble gets great content – he clearly does, and lots of it) be available both as the long-form video (in this case, 40 minutes) as well as shorter (1-5minute) chapters that tie together. The chapters would need to be completely separate video files so I don’t have to download the entire 40 minute segment to find the bit that’s important and relevant to me. That’s a biggy so let me elaborate – even if I know the exact timecode for a segment in a longer video, I don’t want to download the whole thing and then jump through it. Instead, I want summaries of the chapters so I can quickly skim through the summaries and watch, say, 10 minutes out of 40 that’s highly focused.
Now, I know this won’t work for everyone. Scoble, for example, is passionate about not editing his videos because they’re conversations and I completely respect that as a viewer, a videographer myself, and an interviewee on his show. But even conversations often have chapters: the business chapter, the competition chapter, the upcoming features chapter, etc. I’m not advocating editing anything more than it’s already been edited – just making it more consumable.
There’s a reason YouTube became so wildly popular, and I don’t think it’s fair to brush the phenomenon off as “that was for fun stuff, but serious video needs to be long.” That’s a load of BS. I consume deep articles on technical subjects all the time, but I often skim for the good bits and jump out of the site to research related items before jumping back in. Both would be made possible by using text-based summaries with hyperlinked chapters as the basis for navigating a given video.
Thoughts?
Videos (and podcasts) suck sometimes
So I already commented on the whole Scoble thing, but I was commenting in general about how linking is usually better than not linking. I think everyone gets that.
But there’s another discussion going on that’s almost as interesting. Paul M. Watson got me thinking with his comment on my original post, which of course, led to me reading his blog. Specifically, his blog entry about how he doesn’t like video. It’s not too hard to find other opinions in like vein, such as Mathew Ingram’s post about video being Scoble’s achilles heel. Just take a peek over at Techmeme and Tailrank and you’ll see there are quite a few discussions, including this one, bubbling up.
I don’t really agree with the specific details (some don’t think his coverage of Intel was that great, others just think video isn’t that great, etc), but I agree partially in spirit. I watch the occasional ScobleShow episode or listen to the occasional podcast – but not often, and not religiously. I read his blog (and dozens of others) almost daily, though. So what’s the difference?
Blogs are massively easier to consume. You can skim them, you get headlines, you have hyperlinks to follow an extra interesting story around the web, etc. The list goes on and on – but what it comes down to, for me, is time. If I’m going to watch a 20 minute video or listen to a 30 minute podcast, I basically can’t do anything else during that time. I also can’t “skip to the good bits” easily.
With text (blogs, articles, reviews, interviews, whatever), those things don’t apply. I can consume blogs in 1-minute chunks of time I have between tasks. I can explore the web to find out more. I can easily find the stuff I’m really interested in.
Don’t get me wrong – I love certain videos and podcasts a great deal. But the signal-to-noise ratio has to be sky-high to get me to invest my time.
Now I’m just gonna sit back and see if any other interesting discussions come up over this furor… I’m sure there will be.
Grab some popcorn, enjoy the show.
Scoble: Throwing himself under busses so I don't have to.
My friend, Robert Scoble, has two great rants up about blogging & linking: Big gadget sites don’t link to blogs followed by Pissing off the blogosphere.
His main point is a valid one – far too many places, whether they be old media (The New York Times) or big blogs (Engadget) or even small bloggers who are afraid people won’t read every word they’ve written, don’t link to external sources.
This is actually a huge deal. The real, true power of the web is just that – it’s a web. Everything can be interconnected, and learning about or researching a subject can be vastly easier online than anywhere else. Using hyperlinks is the very reason content belongs online. If you don’t hyperlink your content, why on earth do you have it online?
People often wonder why “old media” is struggling to find a voice and an audience (and a business plan) for online content. Rarely is the fact that “old media” tend to be stingy linkers mentioned – but I suspect it’s actually a fundamental reason people choose to get much of their content elsewhere.
For me, I’ve never really thought about it in these terms until Robert brought it up. I’ve always tried to link everything and anything, even words like “Google” and “Sun” (surely you know that Google = http://www.google.com and Sun = http://www.sun.com). Why? Because if I were reading my blog, I would want to just be able to click on pertinent details and dig deeper rather than having to open a new window and Google for the subject at hand. It just makes sense. If a word or phrase can be hyperlinked, and it’s more useful that way, it should be.
By the way, this situation also exposes what’s so great about bloggers, especially the big and popular ones – they write about what’s on their mind, often not even thinking about the impact of what they’re saying. Communication is fast, transparent, and emotional.
Preach on, brother Scoble.
Find Satoshi!
Is it possible to use the power of the internet to find a person given only a photo of them and their first name? The Find Satoshi Project is trying to do just that, and I think it’s fascinating. Billions of people to sort through, but given enough exposure on the net, I’m sure it’s possible.
Can you help? Go Find Satoshi and tell your friends!
Amen, brother.
Billionaire Mark Cuban is preaching to my choir with his anti-suit rant.
I’ve only ever owned a single suit, and I only ever wear it to weddings and funerals. Suits are certainly not required or encouraged around SmugMug and never will be.
I’d love to know why so many people think they must wear them. They’re uncomfortable, expensive, difficult to keep clean, bad at temperature regulation, etc etc. Useless, basically.
I am Lex Luthor.
|
A brilliant businessman on a quest for world domination and the self-proclaimed greatest criminal mind of our time! |
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 
