How to stop GD2 from washing away the colors upon resizing images?

Question

I have developed a photo sharing community site using CodeIgniter 1.7. Photos that are uploaded by members are automatically resized in a number of formats, for which I use

Answer 1

I have a small bit of info to contribute to this thread. I'm a photographer and not a web developer so my technical knowledge is not great, however, I have been dealing with this issue so I hope this post will help someone else down the line.

I use an online photo sales tool that resamples all my images using GD. I was having issues with images looking way funky even when uploaded with proper sRGB conversion and ICC profiling attached, when viewing on my wide-gamut monitor.

What I found the problem to be is that GD strips all metadata and ICC profiles from the original files. Then the browsers, not seeing any profile, are not displaying them correctly. It's slight on a standard-gamut monitor but very obvious on wide-gamut.

If you're having problems with this, you can test my theory by using Firefox and changing a setting in about:config. Change the value of "gfx.color_management.mode" from the default of "2" to "1". This setting will force Firefox to assume any image without an ICC profile is sRGB and will display it as such. Images should then appear as you would expect and identical to Photoshop/Lightroom/etc. Why all browsers do not use this common-sense approach as their default is beyond me.

Unfortunately, my shopping cart is only setup to use PHP GD so I cannot get good results at this time. I would really like to see GD updated to leave ICC profiles attached or to have the option of adding a simple sRGB profile on export.

More info here: http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html#