Yup, Color Management is Absent in iOS

After we published our browser color management PSA yesterday, those of you reading this site on your iOS devices probably noticed that your browsers failed “the test”. The reason? Color management is strangely absent from iOS. Software engineer Jeffrey Friedl, who discovered this fact a few months ago, writes,

[…] try viewing this blog post on your iOS browser; the results will, I’m fairly certain, leave you feeling blue.

Obviously I can personally test only a small subset of devices and applications, but I have not found any — not even one — iOS application that displays the second image properly. You can save it to your camera roll and view it with any number of applications, including apps from such leaders as Apple and Adobe, and they all show me as blue because they all assume incorrectly, even though the color profile is right there in the image. Back in 2006, on the History of Color Mis-Management page of my color-space writeup, I called such applications “Color Stupid”, but in this day and age, such applications should probably be called something much worse, like “Color Moronic”, or “Color Leaves-Me-Dumbfounded”.

The blog post is chock full of images that won’t display properly on your “color stupid” iOS device.

So Much For That Glorious iPad Screen: iOS and its Apps are Not Even Color Managed [Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog]

P.S. To learn more about digital image color spaces, check out Friedl’s great 7 page primer.