I’ve been banging my head on my Mac & PC monitors with this! :'(

I had gone a long way already with color matching my Mac & PC displays, but this is far worse!

Suppose you have a logo on a plain color background that has a specific color code, let’s say #A1B2C3.

  • If you save the logo as a GIF, you can just put it on a css background of #A1B2C3 and the background colors will match.
  • If you save the logo as a JPEG, it’s a tiny little bit more complex but it still can be done. Just make sure that:
    1. You save the JPEG withOUT incorporating an ICC color profile
    2. You do not compress the JPEG so strong that it cannot encode a proper background color
  • If you save the logo as PNG-8… good luck!
    • First there is no option (in Photoshop CS2 at least) to choose whether or not to include a color profile.
    • But worse: it will include the gamma of your current display. So if you save the image on a Mac then try to display it in a PC browser, the displayed background of the image will no longer be #A1B2C3!
    • IE7 and FireFox2 both try to compensate for the gamma being different on PC and Mac.
    • If you now try to match the displayed color on your PC and put that into your CSS, then it will probably display incorrectly on the Mac. Crap! :(

That’s a shame, because in many situations, PNG-8 will compress much nicer than JPEG and much better than GIF. But if you can’t color match it with your CSS on all browsers, it’s almost useless…

Comments from long ago:

Comment from: Mox Folder

Maybe it’s a photoshop issue … did you try to set the “color management policies to Off” in “Color Settings” Menu?

2007-03-20 22-23

Comment from: Jamie

This isn’t an issue with the .png format…

2009-12-29 23-47