Hochzeitsfotograf Daniel Zihlmann – Fotograf Hochzeit Blog Zürich – Bern – Genf – St. Moritz – Basel – Luzern – Lausanne

If you are interested in photography you might also have heard about color management, color spaces and ICC profiles. The sRGB color space (read more about all the technical stuff here) was developed 1996 as the standard default color space for the internet. Later it was found that a standardization for all the devices in a color managed workflow would be very helpful: digital cameras, scanners, computers, monitors, printers and editing software like photoshop and of course web browsers should be set to the same color space (of course advanced users can convert to the right color space, but that might be tricky). The idea was that the sRGB color space should be the standard for all these devices and software. Using the same color space on all these devices and software is already a good step toward seeing the same color on all theses devices (that every device itself has to be calibrated is another complicated story, but you get the point).

So now comes the truth. After so many years that the sRGB color space and profile is used worldwide, it is still not sure that your web browser like Internet Explorer (hopefully not!), Safari or Firefox will support ICC profiles and show sRGB pictures correctly.

Test yourself. Are the three words Green, Blue and Red in the above picture written in the corresponding color? If not, you have a problem. It means that your web browser does NOT support ICC profiles.

With Safari you should be OK, Internet Explorer maybe not and Firefox? Firefox 3.x can support ICC profiles, but you have to be an advanced user to activate the support in the preferences.

Read more about how to change the settings of Firefox in THIS ARTICLE on the website of color control specialist Datacolor, the creater of the Spyder calibration tools. By the way, Datacolor is a swiss company :-)

Ever wondered why your photos get a slight color shift when you first view them in Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom and later in your web browser on your blog or website? This might be the reason. That your web browser doesn’t support ICC profiles (or that you have to enable the ICC color profile support in Firefox).

Another mystery of color management solved. Don’t worry, there are still a lot of stumbling blocks left.

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[UPDATE] You can find a quick introduction to color management here. If you are a photographer and want to dive deeper into the subject, I recommend that you visit the website of the European Color Initiative ECI. The best thing I ever read about color management is the Digipix brochure on their download section. You can download the PDF here in English or German. Also don’t miss to download the calibration wallpapers for your monitor for PC or Mac. They give you a quick daily check if the calibration of your monitor is OK.

I was getting tired of my download workflow. When I came back home after photographing a wedding it took me so much time just to download the 3000+ images and back them up. Shooting in RAW + JPEG I filled up like 10-12 CompactFlash cards and every ten minutes or so I had to change the card in my reader. Of course I could work on something else in the meantime, but I always had to check if the download was completed and I could change the card. Otherwise the whole process would even take longer… There had to be a solution to make this faster and easier.

First I changed from 4GB SanDisk Extreme IV to 8GB SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash Cards. That meant half the cards to handle, to carry around at the wedding and to download and back up at home. There was a dramatically price drop in the 8GB cards during the last months, so upgrading was not expensive. And for saving my time on a boring routine job it was worth it anyway.

Second I went for the new Lexar Professional UDMA FireWire 800 CompactFlash Reader. They are stackable and you can daisy chain up to 4 of them and then they will allow for concurrent downloads. So you can download 4 cards at a time. Sweet!