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I have been having some issues with understanding how Apple's preview deals with Color profiles. I have noticed that when viewing a standard sRGB image on my Dell u2711 or MacBook Display that the same image appears to be more saturated and vibrant in Chrome than in Preview.

I realize I am using wide gamuts and also that Chrome does not support any ICC profiles, but how can I ensure my colors are being reproduced accurately for the web, including both lower end monitors and wide gamut displays?

Here is an image showing what I am talking about:

Chrome logo example

The image to the left is in Chrome and the image to the right is Preview (Mountain Lion). If you have a wide gamut display, the logo on the left will be much more vibrant, but the file is the same!

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I'm not sure why, but according to different websites Chrome makes colors too saturated on wide gamut displays. As a workaround, you could open it with /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --enable-monitor-profile.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143#c158

--enable-monitor-profile works by mapping everything to sRGB and then applying the sRGB->monitor profile transformation. This prevents CSS colors and untagged images from becoming oversaturated on a wide gamut monitor but does not preserve the large gamut of color spaces like Pro Photo RGB and Adobe RGB 1998.

A complete color management solution is pending http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=37028

You could also reduce the gamut of the display.

Besides asking browser developers to fully support color management on their software, there’s a workaround we can use on most wide gamut LCDs to make web colors look right: reduce their gamut temporarily. Most of those displays have a “color mode” or "color presets" menu on their controls that allows you to apply an sRGB simulation to the monitor.

The workaround would be to switch the display to sRGB and produce a color profile specific for that mode. When browsing the web, you’d select the sRGB profile and switch the display to sRGB by using its on-screen controls.

Depending on how you use your computer it could work for you, but clearly it doesn’t work for me since I browse the web while I work on Photoshop and other color managed programs, where a large gamut would be beneficial.

Chrome doesn't support ICC profiles either. Images that aren't saved as sRGB aren't displayed correctly:

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