Jul 3, 2009 2
Safari changing graphic colors on you? – Find out how to change the way Safari handles web graphics
I’ve been doing web graphics for quite awhile now and throughout my years as a graphic designer I’ve always had a problem with how Safari handles web graphics. Safari is the only browser on the market today that honors ICC profiles within graphics, which seems a bit odd to me but I can understand how it has its place depending on the graphic you’re wanting to view and/or load.
One of my major grips is with the graphic editing applications out today. Not a single one, that I know of at least, will allow you to save images without an ICC profile. They all put some sort of default profile in once the image is saved. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but since Safari honors those profiles the colors within those graphics are never the same. This causes a few different problems, namely a problem when you have a background image that doesn’t repeat and you fill the remaining space with a solid color. The RGB color that you use as your background will never match up with the ICC profile and how Safari renders those images out that contain them.
So the simplest fix to how Safari displays graphics on a web site is to remove the ICC profiles. But how do you do that if none of the graphics programs will allow you to save them without an ICC profile? There are a few different applications that can be used to do this. The most popular being PngCrush.
However, normally a web site that we build can have quite a few graphics with it and doing them one by one, which you must do with the command line tool PngCrush, begins to get tiresome and tends to be a big waste of time. So I did some digging and found a really cool application called ImageOptim that does the trick. Not only that it includes a few more command line tools that it uses to optimize any graphic you drop into its window. I mainly work with PNG files so I drag an image folder over to it and using PngCrush it removed all the ICC profiles and optimizes the graphics for me, saving them back over the top of the old files. Then I can simply SVN them into the proper client account and I’m done and problem solved.
Give ImageOptim a look, I’m sure it will come in handy for any graphic designer or web site builder. Mac only from what I can tell.
