[one09jason]

I'm a web designer/developer, and I'm stumped about color. The question is, of course:

How does one get the colors used one's website to look the same when viewed on either a Mac or PC?

I'm not talking about the web safe colors, and yes I know about about gamma and images and the techniques for mitigating those problems. I've talking about a more pernicious problem, that few people seem to be talking about: WHITE POINT. It seems that most mac displays are set to 6500K by default, and most PC displays to 9300K. This has more of an impact on color that anything else. No average web surfer knows the white point of their display, and certainly can't be expected to change it for veiwing sites, which means that we're stuck this difference. As web designer's, are we just that screwed, or is there something that can be done to make those ordinary HTML eb" rs look the same MAC vs PC?

[Raman]

Probably the only thing you can do is use different graphics if you detect that the user is using a mac. Short of that, there's no way.

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by one09jason:
<STRONG>I'm a web designer/developer, and I'm stumped about color. The question is, of course:

How does one get the colors used one's website to look the same when viewed on either a Mac or PC?

I'm not talking about the web safe colors, and yes I know about about gamma and images and the techniques for mitigating those problems. I've talking about a more pernicious problem, that few people seem to be talking about: WHITE POINT. It seems that most mac displays are set to 6500K by default, and most PC displays to 9300K. This has more of an impact on color that anything else. No average web surfer knows the white point of their display, and certainly can't be expected to change it for veiwing sites, which means that we're stuck this difference. As web designer's, are we just that screwed, or is there something that can be done to make those ordinary HTML eb" rs look the same MAC vs PC?</STRONG>

You could open your images in Photoshop and go to your 'View &gt; Proof setup &gt; Windows RGB' to see how your images will look. It's the safest way of ensuring your graphics are going to look their most consistent.

Is it any wonder than PC gamma tends to lean toward the 'Dark Side'?

[ 03-21-2002: Message edited by: Simon Mundy ]

[one09jason]

I figured the browser switch would be the only solution, but that depends on knowing that PC whitepoint is usually all the same (9300k, quite blue). Would you guys say that's true? I don't think there's any way to detect someone's whitepoint with JavaScript, or anything else, is there?

[larkost]

There are a couple of generic differences between Mac's and PC's in this regard (temperature and gamma), but if you are trying to make the web appear color corrected to your audience, then forget about it. MacOS (all flavors after 7) supports color correction, PC's don't.

It is simply not built into windows at all, and there is no standard for RMDAC's on the PC side, so they all interpret things a bit differently. There are a few color calibration systems out for PC's, but most of the time they are not worth the effort.

And on top of all that there is colorspace difference between Mac's and PC's (the way they chose to split the bits between the colors).

Simple answer: you can do this sort of thing for Mac's, but you can never expect it to translate into the Windows side, they just have not done the work required.

[Millennium]

Automatically, there is no way.

The problem is, most browsers don't support the W3C-standard gamma correction. If they did, your colors would automatically look the same, cross-platform, with no modifications. As it stands, though, most do not. OmniWeb does, and I think IE5/Mac does too. Mozilla may have just gotten this; I'm not certain (there's an argument going on as to whether or not this should be in for 1.0 or pushed back for later, but a patch got merged in about a week ago; I just don't know if it has been turned on).