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Being a Mac user means a lot of things: Apple stickers plastered on your car and cats, superior user interface use and the occasional bit of wierdness created by shared resources that bend over backward to accommodate kludgy Microsoft solutions.
Such is the case that Chris MacAskill outlines at SmugMug today.
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Essentially, Macs ship by default to render images brighter than PCs, owing to what's known as the gamma setting. This also relates to MS's love of the horrifying sRGB color standard. Bizarrely, Firefox is so attuned to web standards that it accommodates the variation, while Safari will make the mistake, in part because it tries too hard to go along with the instructions the photos are encoded with.
What's it all mean? There's a darn good reason you might look really pale in your well-tanned photos from the tropics. And it's not you this time. It's the computer.
There is a simple fix: Switch the gamma from 1.8 to 2.2. But here's where it really gets Mac-obsessive. I am such a long-time user of the Mac OS, dating back to the mid-1980s, that I prefer 1.8 gamma. It gives a more dreamy look to everything. There's a gentle, cloudy light, much like the sleeping LED indicator on my Powerbook, that pervades the entire look and feel. I'll take my incorrect images. "Normal" gamma reminds me of being at work.
