Photos are more washed out in FireFox than Safari

Question

Hi. I've created photo pages in iweb, and when i view the pages in Firefox, the images look much less saturated/more washed out, than when i view them in safari. Any idea why this might be?
the site is www.coutroulis.com then go to 'shots'
thx

Answer 1

Not all browsers support Color Management like Safari does. With FireFox, it can work, but is turned off in the default installation. Sites that look very nice on a Mac monitor with Safari can look very washed out on a PC with IE or FireFox (Safari for Windows does better).
Here is a page that explains the concept pretty well (these issues were not a problem for me in the past as I used GoLive and now Dreamweaver, with graphics prepared by Photoshop):
http://www.gballard.net/psd/golive_pageprofile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html#
I've found that having both browsers open to the same page makes it easier to see the examples properly.
Note the colors in the chart about half way down the page. The chart is built with graphics that have color management information that tells the browser how to deal with it. Safari shows the named colors perfectly (the box with RED text is actually Red in color), Firefox does not (the box with Red text is actually Blue in color). This is an extreme way to show that some browsers are using Color Management info from the pictures on the page. Your photos have information that Safari is using, but not FireFox.
The page has instructions on how to turn on Color Management in FireFox but you can't turn it on for everyone who comes to your site.
The page is in depth, with opinions on how to avoid the problems at all by using the sRGB Color Space which is the default option when using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and "Save For Web". "Save For Web" is also just about the easiest way to get great looking photo's at the smallest file size, for web page photo's.
So you get three things from the Photoshop programs - Graphics load faster because they are smaller than the less powerful iWeb optimization, they often look better than other programs that just let you save as a jpg with a variable % quality level, and the sRGB Color Space used in the photo's works well in all browsers and platforms.
Web Site Design has always been about compromise - quality, speed, and accuracy. If your site is only for you and some other Mac/Windows friends who are using Safari - No Problem, otherwise you might want to adapt as needed for better pages for a larger audience.