iPhone honors ICC profiles

[Martin_Doudoroff]

I would hardly tout the iPhone as a professional image display tool, but this is kind of interesting: my testing indicates that the iPhone honors ICC profiles embedded in the images it displays. I loaded an image (in ProPhoto RGB space) into Photoshop and exported (JPG) four ways:

• Converted to SRGB with a profile
• Converted to SRGB without a profile
• Not converted to SRGB but with a profile
• Not converted to SRGB and without a profile

I then moved those images to the iPhone and looked at them in the built-in viewer. The image that was simply saved as a JPG without a profile looks wrong. The two images that contain the profile look functionally identical and correct. The one that is simply converted to SRGB (no profile embedded) looks okay, but less correct.

Perhaps it isn't entirely surprising that the iPhone inherited OS X's ICC profile handling—the iPhone is running OS X, after all. Still, who would have expected this from a phone?

[Dennis_Vied]

Interesting. Perhaps it was more trouble to take such a capability out of the operating system than to leave it in, and engineer the phone to run the system unchanged without problems. Probably not a market driven decision, but a practicality. But, what do I know.