It's the color management tab in the Windows dialog, not an IE dialog. I was looking there for it.

Just an FYI regarding the Windows Color Management applet, Advanced tab.

With the "Windows Color System Defaults" portion it's a bit difficult to determine just how these settings are used, but here it is:

They are used to supply defaults for missing profiles required during WCS color transform in color managed apps.

1) Device profile:  If a device has no profile specified anywhere else, this setting would be used as the fallback default. (eg, leave as sRGB.  Be careful NOT to set this to a "virtual device model profile" - which are also listed in the "All Profiles" tab as WCS Device Profiles - confusing!, as these can have serious negative impact on system performance, such as CPU spikes for Windows Gadgets.)

2) Viewing conditions profile: This one tells the system about your viewing environment. (sRGB version for D65, ICC version for D50)

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Per a MS program manager:

The Windows Photo Gallery/Windows Live Photo Gallery, and Windows Photo Viewer are the only Windows components that color manage to the display profile.  Most MS Office apps, (and now IE9), will honor embedded source profiles in images, but then convert to sRGB and throw that at the display.

A technology dubbed High Color was built into the Windows 7 plumbing.  Color conversion would be to an extended range color space.  Wide gamut color data can be converted into this space without any loss. Compliant displays (and display cards) would be required to be able to convert internally from the extended space to their native color space.  Any wide gamut image content would be properly mapped to take advantage of a display's wide gamut, and sRGB data wouldn't over-saturate by being treated as though it were already in the display's native wide gamut space.  (Un-color-managed RGB would be treated as sRGB.)   Unfortunately the Desktop Window Manager was unable to implement the High Color support in time for switching this plumbing on for the Windows 7 release.

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Not sure if existing Display hardware already supports this High Color system once/if it's actually implemented, or whether it will also integrate an up to date Display profile into the equation or merely utilize the "factory specs" (EDID) and allow color managed apps to refine accuracy further using profiles.  But the stated approach would at least neutralize the wide gamut display issue without requiring users to participate (profile their monitors) in achieving "acceptable" color.

I'm pretty sure the project team at MS that implemented this "color management" into IE9 are not stupid, and realize their approach is flawed.  I believe they took this approach to be consistent with their Office apps approach or maybe for some other longer term reason.  To foist that web page on users claiming "look at us, we're properly color managed!", with that awareness of flaws takes a lot of chutzpa, is hilarious\discouraging to people with color management knowledge, and extremely misleading to those without.

I'm getting confused about "users creating any color profiles of their montors" in compliance with any color space. What I do and assume others using pucks do is to generate a profile of the montor which informs CM of what I am actually seeing with respect to the actual color numbers such that WYSIWYG. The color space choice then, is utterly separate, and makes no assumptions as to the accuracy or inaccuracies of the viewing conditions of the monitor.

This is the only thing that ever makes sense, and if an individual user chooses to go a different route, that's their decision and hopefully, WYSIWYG still is valid.

I want to stick to the two pronged approach: Calibrate then profile the viewing device, then pick your poison...err, color space.

But then, I am still centered on printing correctly, and from what I can see, this is becoming passe'. Few print any more as the ultimate output. Bill Gates saw this many years ago when he envisioned homes equipped with extremely thin panels hanging from the wall displaying all manner of art in faithful colors. That's one of the big reasons he started Corbis, or at least I was told that when I went up to Redmond years ago to look into Corbis. That being so, the Internet access has to be color managed from source to display device. Perhaps manufacturers will be able to match the dE tolerance of the best printers on the market today, which do extremely well with canned profiles from the paper folks. Then pucks go by-by as well.

Hi gener7,

 

Don't be so certain.  Please read the information starting in post #2 in this thread.

 

IE9 is actually NOT properly color-managing the images it displays, in that it completely ignores your monitor profile!

 

Therefore, for anyone who has profiled their monitor - especially those models that display a gamut differing significantly from that of the standard sRGB profile, such as modern wide-gamut LCDs - the colors will now actually always be wrong

in IE9!

Hi Noel

I did indeed go over post 2 and not having a wide gamut monitor I would have thought that IE9 would somehow pick up the monitor profile set in Color Management (in the Control Panel.) My mistake.

Ditto for Hudechrome. Maybe it will be fixed by the time I can afford a wide gamut monitor

Gene