Ben Galbraith’s Blog

Yesterday, I posted some of my frustrations with how color display behavior got a bit wacky when I hooked up a non-Apple external monitor to my MacBook Pro.

Responses varied from, “I’ve seen this too and I feel your pain” to “Hey noob, don’t expect different monitors to display colors the same.” Thanks to all of you who have shared helpful suggestions on calibration and so forth.

But I failed to convey what was happening, and as I set about clarifying it, things got weirder.

So, here’s a PNG image that shows what I occasionally see: Terminal.app rendering what should be the same color differently on the same display:

I included this image in my original blog post, and “Lew Z” posted this comment:

When I mouseover your 2 terminal text examples, in DigitalColor Meter I get:

Red: 0
Green: 65535
Blue: 0

For *both*. As far as the OS knows, and what is displayed on your webpage, they are the same color. If you (and maybe I) perceive color differences between the two, it is a physiological issue of how the eyes and brain perceive color when surrounded by different colors (in this case, your window title bars).

This confused me greatly as when I sampled the image, the colors came out as #00FF00 and #7EF41D. Fortunately, right next to me is another identical hardware configuration I can replicate this on: MacBook Pro (15″ instead of 17″, but ordered weeks of each other and same generation, etc.), same OS X version, same Dell display with the same color profile, same versions of the web browsers. So I pulled the image up on that machine and…

…the colors were identical!

It appears that the PNG has some color profile information in it that’s interfering here, so I saved out a GIF version of what I see on my system:

Obviously, the GIF format will dither the colors, etc. but it does convey that the colors are significantly different. On Dion’s system, the GIF appears exactly as it does on mine.

So here’s what has me profoundly confused:

Why would the same image display differently on the same hardware and the same software with the same settings? I understand why the entire image could display uniformly different to the eye, but why does just part of the image change its actual content?

Anyone know?

If the two images above look exactly the same to you, move along; this blog post doesn’t apply to you.

Note: I posted a follow-up to this going into a bit more detail on one angle of this.

For much of my workdays, I’m using a Dell 24″ monitor to do most of my work, hooked up to my Mac laptop. For color fidelity, it turns out this has been rather painful. For some reason, this setup has caused me to experience all kinds of weird color glitches, such as the one at the head of this post. At first, I thought this was just colors rendering differently on the external monitor and the laptop’s internal display–but unfortunately, it’s more than that.

The same colors on the same display differently under certain conditions. Here’s another fun example:

This is more than just really annoying. When working on Bespin recently, I discovered that the slice images I’ve made from our designer’s source files contain different color values than what he initially specified. At least, some of the slices do. The slices are in fact inconsistent due to this same problem. Argh!

I’ve checked OS X’s System Preferences and the Dell is using its own Color Profile; isn’t this the right thing for it to be using? Why am I getting this behavior?

My guess would be that a Carbon/Cocoa Window, when displayed, uses the settings of the display on which it initially appears, but when you move the window from display to display, either the application is responsible for detecting the event and responding to it, or OS X has bugs in properly managing the shifting settings?

Does anyone know how I can fix this problem? Maybe I just need to start working on Apple displays again… or limit myself to one monitor and class the laptop display at work.

UPDATE: Because several folks were confused about what exactly I was showing in the Terminal screenshot above, I replaced it with something that may illustrate the problem a bit more clearly. Look at the text in the Terminal graphic. See how the shade of green is different? This is not because of foreground/background windowing issues. The color green is different, even though its the same theme, etc. These are not screenshots from different displays sewn together; they are running on the same display; so this isn’t to do with embedded color profiles in images, etc.

Recently Dion and I gave a talk at O’Reilly’s well-produced Web 2.0 Expo conference.

We messed up. Let me explain.

Last fall, on a lark, we wrote a quick program that would buzz at random intervals. We finished it right before walking on-stage to give a keynote at The Ajax Experience and ran it with the rule that whenever the buzzer sounded, we had to instantly switch speakers. Folks loved it, so on occasion we’ve been repeating the buzzer thing.

We did it at Web 2.0 Expo, but this time, the crowd was not amused. A sampling of the feedback on the conference site:

Thought [the talk] was great…except…hated the random buzzer bit. I can appreciate adding some fun…but…a little silly at first and eventually really irritating.

The the random buzzer was really terrible, distracting and loud. It was funny for about 1 minute. Doing it for the whole presentation just didn’t make sense.

Maybe the volume was higher than it has been in times past? Maybe we had the maximum interval set too high? In any event, I went to apologize in the comment thread when I was presented with… the dreaded login:

Time to create my 501st Internet credential; but wait! They support OpenID!

I’ve been hearing lots about how I can use my existing Google credentials to login to websites that support OpenID. I couldn’t wait to take advantage of that here. So I click on the “Use an OpenID to sign up” link and with the magic of a cross-fade technique, I see this:

I’ve no idea how this stuff works, so I clicked on the “Read more about OpenID” link; a pop-up window opened:

First thing I did was click on “Check against this list” to see if I already had an OpenID as I thought I might. Doh! Error:

No problem, URLs get mangled from time to time. This one seems to have an obvious problem:

http://wiki.openid.net//Public_OpenID_providers#Other_Services_Providing_Identity_Services

I removed the extra forward-flash after “wiki.openid.net” and then got this page:

That’s right; to find out how to avoid creating a login for the O’Reilly site, I have to create a login for the OpenID wiki site. Of course.

The other links on the pop-up were equally useless and/or broken.

At this point I just went ahead and tried my Google login id:

Rats. I googled around a bit and found this page:

Sweet! I have a wordpress.com account, so I tried that:

OpenID, I hate you! Still, perhaps there’s light at the end of the tunnel.