I have been reading through many of your posts and tried searching, but I can’t find an answer to my problem: I simply cannot get the color of artichokes to turn out right in my photographs. They either look dull and grey (I think because they have a slight film on the leaves that reflects light??) or the flash catches them and they are neon green. I have tried indoor light, natural sunlight, every sort of light we have at home etc. No dice.

Have you had this problem? Any suggestions? Is it something particular about artichokes or just my relatively simplistic lighting situation?

All the best, Erik

Thanks! sRGB will give you better results than Adobe RGB… but you are right, there is still a distinct difference. You can change the colorspace to Generic RGB in Photoshop (select Convert to Profile in the Edit menu), but you will lose color depth when do so your photos still won’t have the same richness that you see in Safari. I think what really needs to happen is that we all tell firefox to get their act together and start supporting color profiles!

(By the by, I really love your blogs. The longer I keep at food blogging, the more I get into the photography as well as the food. It’s been really fun and fascinating, the way my interests have expanded through food blogging.)

jack –

Larry – Thanks. Yes, that’s a great analogy.

Oliver – Thanks for the tip. You are right that there is an entire color calibration step to ensuring that you get accurate color from start to finish. Maybe at some point I’ll have a whole post on that… but my guess is that it will take many, many posts to get it right. Color calibration is so incredibly tricky… I have lots of friends who spend weeks trying to get their equipment setup to get an exactly perfect print. I’m afraid I don’t have that kind of patience! At this point, I just want to make sure that what I see & think that I’m publishing actually gets viewed as I intended. I know that’s even more than I can hope for at this point, but a girl can dream!

For extensive photoshop’ing & printing it would certainly make sense to utilize a broader color space, but I see little use for the anyway limited presentation capabilities of a web browser (most readers use unmanaged browsers). So until this will change and with the many quirks and rendering problems Safari has re: CSS compatibility, I can’t afford to take it into consideration.

All the best,