For my first (and probably last for some time) entry here, I'm going to talk about something every Deviant should know, and that's colour profile support in Firefox 3, why you should turn it on, and how to do it.

You'll sometimes see photographers bemoaning the fact that their perfect colours in Photoshop simply don't look the same when the image is viewed in a web browser; washed-out, duller, 'lifeless'.

That's because they are.

When Photoshop displays images it uses a known set of colour profile settings specific to your monitor to try and make the colours appear more true to life. Internet Explorer does not do this. Nor does Opera. Google Chrome doesn't currently, though it's coming very soon.

And Firefox? Well, Firefox does support colour profiles as of version 3, but the functionality is turned off by default.

Turning it on is not a tick-box in the options, but it is quite simple. First, you'll need to browse to the internal settings page of Firefox by typing about:config into the address bar. If you get a warning about breaking stuff, you'll need to confirm you're not an idiot, then you get to the settings list.

Find the setting called gfx.color_management.enabled and set it to true by double-clicking it. Now restart Firefox.

From now on you'll be seeing photo colours as they were intended. The difference is subtle, but it is most definitely there. For more information on this, side-by-side comparisons showing the difference, and reasons why you might not want it turned on, go here: [link]