What the heck is going on with my laptop's color management?

March 8, 2018 10:33 AM

My laptop is doing weird things with colors. They look different in different browsers, or sometimes in the same browser but for different versions of the same image. I'm mystified. Can you help?

So I have a new-ish Dell XPS 15 9560, with the 4K display. I've calibrated the screen using a Datacolor Spyder5 and DisplayCal, following the instructions I found online very carefully. I use this laptop primarily for photo editing, and everything looks great in Lightroom and Photoshop. However, things don't look great all the time. I have a feeling that this must be a color management issue of some kind, but I don't know what's wrong or how to fix it.

Here are some examples of what I'm seeing. The following photographs were all taken in manual mode, with identical camera settings. They are JPEGs, straight out of the camera, unaltered and never even loaded into a photo editor.

Front page of Metafilter, Firefox
Front page of Metafilter, Chrome
Earth from geostationary orbit, Firefox
Earth from geostationary orbit, Chrome

So far, it just looks like Chrome is having problems with color management. Color management in Windows is a bit of a Wild West, so I was prepared to just live with it and use Firefox, but then this happened:

Those two identical pictures of the lighthouse, downloaded from Petapixel and uploaded to Imgur, Firefox
Those two identical pictures of the lighthouse, downloaded from Petapixel as TIFFs, imported into Lightroom NOT edited, exported back to my computer as JPEGs, and uploaded to Imgur, still Firefox

Note that both versions of the lighthouse image look perfectly fine in Photoshop, Lightroom, and Windows Photos when viewed on my laptop.

What the heck is going on? Is this a Windows 10 issue? A browser issue? A color calibration problem? What do I need to do to fix this?

Thanks a lot, this is driving me absolutely bonkers.

posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Chrome has had bugged color profile handling in the past ... googling led me to this google product forums post which might contain some help or at least understanding of the problem. Looks like you can disable the icc color profile or force basic sRGB to see if that helps.
posted by destructive cactus at 10:44 AM on March 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Firefox has its own colour management and it may or may not be set the same as the system. Take a look in about:config at the gfx.color_management entries.
posted by scruss at 12:27 PM on March 8, 2018

Response by poster: Fantastic. Both browsers are now correctly displaying colors. Thank you both ever so much.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:54 PM on March 9, 2018