A while ago I read in “The Photoshop Book for Digital Phtographers” by Scott Kelby that the default colour space used by Photoshop (and lots of other things) sucks. It’s called sRGB and seems to have been cooked up by Hewlett-Packard (who should know their stuff) and Microsoft (who manifestly don’t).
Scott Kelby says sRGB is ‘arguably the worst possible colour space for professional photographers’ and recommends Adobe RGB instead. So I’ve been using Adobe RGB when I tweak the colours in my pictures, mainly to post on Flickr.
But as this photo shows, most web browsers don’t use embedded colour profiles – in Mac OS X for example, Apple’s Safari does, but Firefox and Opera do not. Heaven only knows what Internet Explorer does on any platform, but I bet that it too uses sRGB regardless of any embedded profile in the original image.
Also, I get some of my photos printed at Photobox.co.uk – I just studied their site and their Fuji printers ignore embedded profiles. Only their large-format poster printers use them.
So I guess I’ve been wasting my time – if I want most people to see my images the way I do, I probably should be using sRGB after all.