Benjamin Ouellet
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PNG Images - Gamma Correction

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One issue you may find with PNG images in Internet Explorer is that they tend to display darker or lighter than the rest of the elements on your page do.  This can create a frustrating web design experience because of the colours in your PNG image may not match the colours you carefully chose for the rest of your website.  You will also notice that all other browsers (ie. Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror) seem to get the colours right.

Why is Internet Explorer doing this?  The reason I found out is due to Internet Explorer adjusting the image's lightness based on the gamma correction curve factor that is embedded inside the PNG image.  Most graphics applications embed a gamma correction curve factor into PNG images when they export since it's a normal part of the PNG specification.  However, this does create big problems for web designers.

What is the solution?  I found a handy tool called TweakPNG which allows you to remove the gamma correction curve value from a PNG image.  This causes PNG images to display correctly in all browsers.  You can find out more about this and download the tool from the following website: http://entropymine.com/jason/tweakpng/

After installing this tool, open up a PNG image with this program, remove the gAMA chunk from the PNG image and save the changes.  You should now find that the PNG image will display properly in IE.