While playing around with Adobe Lightroom, we came up against the problem of colour spaces. Like many small annoyances in modern computing, colour spaces go right back to the early days of colour on computer screens.

It's all very well having images in colour, but you need some way of telling the computer at the other end how to display them - in other words, to tell it which colour is which. The answer is to include what's called a colour space profile within each image, so that the computer can read this and choose the right colours. The problem is that different computers, programs and operating systems use different profiles, with the result that if you're not careful the people in your carefully constructed family photos might end up with purple faces.

It turns out there's an excellent primer on the subject of colour spaces by none other than Jeffrey Friedl, who came up with the also-excellent Flickr plugin for Lightroom.

Probably the most widely used class of application in the world today (on home computers, at least) is the browser, and until now most browsers haven't taken the trouble to read colour profiles properly. Which brings us to an excellent opportunity to plug the recently released free browser Firefox 3, which does deal correctly with colour profiles - just one more reason to use it.