Adventures of an Idiot – occasional ramblings of a photography freak

Just updated Firefox to version 3.0.1 which means that at long last I’m able to try out the Colour Management Add-on (Color Management 0.4 by Sean Hayes) that was mentioned in a blogpost a while ago.

Its available from addons.mozilla.org and its a “GUI front end for enabling color management in Firefox”; the way it works is by enabling the Firefox browser to render images according to a specified colour profile.
In the Options dialogue you can point the Add-on to a user-defined colour profile on your machine (I’ve obviously selected the one I used post-colour calibration of my monitor) but if this field is left blank the system default is used.
If there isn’t a system default then a default sRGB profile is used.

Even before installing the Add-on I noticed that the updated version of Firefox appears to render colours slightly differently… my impression is that they seemed somewhat stronger, or darker maybe.
And all that installing/enabling the Add-on appeared to do was to enhance that effect. Generally then, images seem to me to appear darker across the entire colour spectrum.

I then went through the same exercise with another machine that isn’t colour calibrated, and thus used the system default colour profile.
Same impression.

Now there may be other, subtler, differences that I just haven’t picked up on yet, so what I really want/need to do is spend some time comparing with a machine running v3.0.1 but without the Add-on… an exercise for another day.
Absent that, on present showing was it worth the effort of installing it? Well, its a very small download and the installation process was entirely glitch-free. Nor do there seem to be any adverse side-effects (i.e., conflicts with other Add-ons, or the browser itself) so… probably yes. And certainly if I can discern that the colour rendition is more accurate… even if only marginally.