Let’s start with some history. Back in the mists of time, when the web was new and we used giant glass particle accelerators for monitors, there were no real standards for color on web pages. If you made something blue on a web page, then you could probably depend on your users seeing something blueish, but that was about as good as it got. There was no consistency between monitors. You could post images, but some people would see them as too dark and some people would see them as too light. Since there were no standards, so no one could really claim that the way that they saw things was “right.” By the early 2000s, two parallel developments converged: LCD displays took over from CRTs, and most LCD displays standardized on a single color standard called sRGB, which was closely related to HDTV’s color standard.The “plain” HDTV color standard is called Rec. 709; sRGB uses the same colors but a somewhat different gamma curve. Monitor color profiling became more common and the tooling for ICC color profiles grew up. Photographers got to know color standards and could mostly get consistent color across systems, if both systems had manually-profiled monitors. Safari added color profile support early. This allowed you to take JPEGs and say “this is sRGB” or “this is AdobeRGB”, or any other color system. Unfortunately, this ended up being really problematic – it meant that Safari and non-Safari users would see vastly different views of the same webpages when images had ICC tags attached to them. Since a large fraction of photographers and web designers use Macs, this meant that there was a flood of “this looks good on my system, why are users complaining that it’s ugly” problems. The “fix” was to publish everything as implicitly sRGB and to omit color tags entirely. Then almost all users would see roughly the same thing.I mean, assuming that they hasn’t fiddled with the color settings of their monitor, and that the monitor vendor hadn’t boosted the colors to sell better whe
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