Colour Profile Tip

I used to have the problem where my JPEG images exported from Photoshop would be displayed in a dull tone across viewing browsers such as Windows Explorer, Firefox etc...
Whilst the same image exported in PNG and TIFF would retain the colours.

I thought I'd share why this is so.

Turns out PC browsers cannot read the Adobe RGB format (in which we were fanatically drilled into our heads to use during the course of our Digital Media degree). Although Adobe RGB grants a larger colour space, it's no use if you're just viewing the image via your PC. This reason comes to the fact that Windows Explorer or any other Internet browser (except Safari) does not understand the ICC profile embedded into the image, and hence, becomes all yuck @_@
Windows just defaults to WindowsRGB as it's colour space.

Here's an image worked on in the AdobeRGB workspace, and exported out without the following fix:

Looks dull and yall......

The fix is relatively simple. All you have to do is open Photoshop. Go to Edit --> Convert to Profile. And in your Destination Space, choose sRGB IEC61966-2.1, or any other sRGB format available.

Be careful as this will consequently flatten your image. So here's the result, all nice and colourful:

Now I'm ready to show my images to the world =)

NOTE: The only circumstance where I found this to occur is when I started from a RAW image file. To my limited understanding, RAW files do not come with any ICC profile.

NOTE 2: MACs supposedly have a larger colour space or something. You can set images like the dull one above to adopt the sRGB colour space automatically. Yet to be proven. So if you're a MAC user, please tell me if this is true, or if you can see a difference in the 2 images. Thank you!