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On that demo page if I switch between the original, jpeg, webp, and avif tabs, the colors shift visibly. I have an AdobeRGB wide-color-gamut monitor configured in 10-bit mode, use Firefox with color-management enabled, and I have the AdobeRGB profile correctly set in Windows.

It is incredible to me that in 2021 the web makes it impossible to get even vaguely correct colours onto a screen.

I don't know who's to blame here: Web standards bodies, Mozilla, or the specific AVIF decoder.

But I do know that color-blind people are creating the next generation of imaging standards.



Hey! Leave us out of it. I can see the differences, too. The folks to blame aren’t colorblind. They are color indifferent. :-)


Huh, must depend what type of colour-blindness, and/or how severe, as I can't tell any difference in colour whatsoever.


I am red-green colorblind. I was able to see the changes on the yellow car drawn by SVG. If there were lots of other changes, I couldn’t see those.


Given the original (lossless AVIF) and AVIF tabs match up and the others differ, I wonder if things went wrong with converting to the other formats? I don't have the time to look into the detail here right now, but it could simply be a case of the conversion between the formats losing the the colour space data from the image?

The one group highly unlikely to blame here is web standards bodies, who don't have anything to do with how image formats are rendered (it gets as far as defining the default colour space when none is provided, but that's it). But I'd guess it's likely an image file problem rather than a display problem.


> The one group highly unlikely to blame here is web standards bodies

I'm pretty sure I can blame a web standards body for not standardising colour management for the web!

The colour space of embedded images is no longer the only concern, and is not separate from the colours as defined in CSS, SVG, and Canvas to name a few.

Not to mention that even greyscale images need colour management because Macs, PCs, and Televisions all use different gamma curves.

W3C's efforts have been so underwhelming that Apple, the "bastion" of web standards support has been forced to come up with a non-standard extension: https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-d...

Of course, their extension supports exactly two colour spaces: sRGB and Display P3, because fuck everyone else who isn't using an iDevice or a Mac, am I right?

If I sound salty, it's because I'm a photographer, and as such it grinds my gears that it is literally impossible to use wide-gamut images on the web for any purpose without degrading quality for a substantial fraction of the viewers. I fully expect this to be resolved satisfactorily some time in the 2030s, perhaps the 2040s. Any decade now...


As a former photographer, I agree.

I found this article on fidelity vs appeal handy, especially to illuminate the problems with AVIF's algorithm when you are showing off photos.

https://cloudinary.com/blog/what_to_focus_on_in_image_compre...

I'm waiting for JPEG-XL. And then color management after that.


W3C? Isn't WHATWG the standard that everybody follows?


Yes but also sort of no? It's a whole can of worms, which Web standard is done by who


I think we need a standard to specify which standards organisation to use.


Let's start with a working group


Might be worth filling a bug with Mozilla. I'm pretty sure the files I used don't carry colour profile info that would cause this difference, but I've been wrong before.


I think this one is it? I've kept my eye on it for a while, but it doesn't look like there's been any movement for some time.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1634741


That does seem to be the issue!

The other image formats are colour-managed, so they look relatively desaturated on my WCG monitor. The AVIF images look "stretched" to the full gamut, making them garishly oversaturated.


Test in other browsers; I know of at least two bugs related to color accuracy in Firefox. They get brought up all the time in support forums like r/Firefox.


I'm safari on a iPhone 11 I'm not seeing a difference between the car images in different tabs at all.


Me neither...i guess to test it you need to click on it and compare the zoomed frames




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