[Leica] question about image viewing and profiles

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

I've been looking into complaints that the LUG gallery is muddying many 
images that Bill Clough is posting. They don't look muddy to me, but I 
believe the people who say that they see mud.

After some research, I determined that the majority of his images in the 
gallery are tagged with the ICC profile "Gray gamma 2.2", which is put 
there by his film scanner. I have a profile by that name on my computer, 
so when I clicked on his images, the conversion was done correctly by my 
image viewing software and I saw what he intended.

I wonder how many LUG people are seeing mud. Do you see any significant 
difference between the image quality of these two images:

A: 
http://gallery.leica-users.org/d/486424-2/Harvest_+Estes+Park_+1987.jpg

B: 
http://reid.org/~brian/images/Estes%20Park%20with%20sRGB%20profile.jpg

On my screen, those images look very similar but not totally identical. 
I guess it depends on which software component is doing the color 
transformation.

If you don't see much of a difference, that means that your computer is 
dealing successfully with the unusual but not illegal profile "Gray 
gamma 2.2", which is intended as a Photoshop preview-mode pseudo-profile 
and not an imbedded profile. I guess nobody told this to the 
manufacturer of Bill's scanner.