Buying Art On The Internet And Color Management

In a previous entry I painted a rather ideal view of buying fine art on the Internet. In a perfect world my statements would be true and everyone could sit back and enjoy fine art works at any time. Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world and one fact remains true. What one person sees on their computer screen may not be what another person sees. There are two reasons for this; monitor calibration and color management in the browser. While an artist can't expect everyone to be looking at his work with a calibrated monitor at least now color management, the ability to recognize ICC profiles, is coming to the browser world. Until recently only Safari offered color management, but with the introduction of Firefox version 3, Firefox users can now see images with the proper ICC profile settings. This is great news for me since my statistics show that most visitors to my site are using Firefox as their browser.

Color management, in Firefox, is turned off by default so you will need to change a setting in your browser. Bob Galbraith has a great Firefox color management tutorial on his site. If you check it out you can be browsing with color management. If you are already using color management in your browser you can check out the test page at the International Color Consortium website.

While this is a great step towards improving the fine art buying experience on the web there is still the issue of monitor calibration. Many people never bother with this step and some people do the calibration incorrectly meaning there will always be viewers that aren't seeing the true colors in an art work. As always, viewing art work in person is the best way to know exactly what you are getting.

Pete Hellmann Photography