Why do Facebook photos look wrong in Firefox, and how can I fix color management issues?
Asked 6/22/2012
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2 answers
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After editing photos for web upload, they look correct locally and in Chromium, but once uploaded to Facebook they display with obvious color shifts in Firefox (reds/blues turn purple, greens become oversaturated). The files were resized and stripped of metadata before upload, yet downloading them again shows Facebook has added an ICC profile. Firefox seems to react badly to these tagged images, while other apps and browsers look normal. Why would this happen, and what can be done to make Facebook uploads display correctly in Firefox?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
14y ago
2 Answers
7
This thread on the Firefox support forum's is by someone with a similar problem, and mentions needing to potentially restart your computer after disabling color management in Firefox to get it to stick. I also tested (on Windows7 64-bit in case it makes a difference) Firefox and Chrome using this link and it says that Chrome does not support ICC profiles while Firefox supports ICC v2 profiles, have you checked that your color management is setup correctly in Photoshop? If you were editing JPEGs that were already in sRGB and told Photoshop to convert to sRGB (rather than assign an sRGB profile) that double-handling could be a cause of the problem.
I also seem to recall reading a Facebook engineering blog post about having created a minimal sRGB ICC profile that could be automatically applied to images, but Google can't find it now.
EDIT: Here is the Facebook engineering blog post describing the profile that is added to all images
UPDATE: It looks like the problem is that the images were taken using Adobe RGB rather than sRGB since manually assigning the Adobe RGB (1998) profile to both of them in Photoshop has got the color to match for me. The desaturated look in the second image is a common sign that the image was originally recorded in a wider gamut color space than the one it is currently being displayed in.
Originally by user9646. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user9646
14y ago
0
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Most likely this is a color-management mismatch, not Facebook secretly altering colors beyond adding an ICC profile. Facebook has been known to add a small sRGB ICC profile to uploaded images. Firefox supports ICC color management (notably ICC v2 in the answer cited), while Chrome historically ignored profiles more often, so browser differences can appear.
A few likely causes/fixes from the community answers:
- Make sure your images are properly converted to sRGB for web use, not just assigned an sRGB profile in Photoshop. Assigning vs converting incorrectly can cause major shifts.
- Check Firefox color-management settings carefully; changes may require a browser or even system restart to fully take effect.
- On Ubuntu/Linux, a bad system monitor profile can cause this. One reported fix is removing the root window ICC profile with:
xprop -root -remove _ICC_PROFILE
So the issue is probably Firefox correctly applying color management against a bad/unsupported profile somewhere in the chain, rather than refusing all tagged images. The safest workflow is: convert to sRGB before export, embed a standard sRGB profile if needed, and verify your browser/system display profile setup.
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