Why Your Edited Images Look Different on Other Screens

It’s one of the most frustrating experiences in digital image editing: you spend hours perfecting a photo’s colour, saturation, and brightness on your screen, only to see it look completely different—often darker, less or much more vibrant, or with a colour cast—on a another device. This common problem isn’t due to your editing skills; it’s a complex interaction of factors related to colour management, hardware variation, and user settings.

1. The Colour Space Disconnect

The fundamental reason for colour shifts is the way digital colour is defined and interpreted:

• Colour Profiles and Gamuts: Every colour in your image is stored as numerical data (Red, Green, Blue values). A colour profile (like sRGB or Adobe RGB) is a set of instructions embedded in the file that tells a device how to translate those numbers into actual visible colours. The colour gamut is the range of colours a specific device can physically display.

• The sRGB Standard: The most common colour space for the web, email, and consumer devices is sRGB. It has a relatively small colour gamut.

• Wider Gamuts: Professional cameras and high-end monitors often use wider colour spaces like Adobe RGB or Display P3 to capture and display more vibrant colours.

• The Problem: If you edit an image in a wide colour space (like Adobe RGB) but view it on a standard monitor or device that only understands sRGB, the colours it can’t display (the extra vibrant ones) will be compressed or misinterpreted. This often leads to colours looking duller or washed out on the standard screen. To avoid this for web sharing, it’s best to convert your final image to sRGB before exporting.

2. Monitor and Display Hardware Differences 

Even if two screens use the exact same colour profile, their physical construction ensures they’ll never look identical.

• Calibration: The most significant factor. Monitor calibration is the process of using a specialised hardware device (a colourimeter) and software to measure and adjust a screen’s colour output to a known, neutral standard.

• Your Screen: You may have a calibrated, professional monitor that shows the image accurately.

• Their Screen: Most people’s devices are not calibrated. They run on factory settings, which are often intentionally set to be too bright, too cool (blue), or overly saturated to look appealing on a store shelf. When your perfectly balanced image appears on their uncalibrated screen, it will look wrong.

• LCD (Liquid Crystal Display): Uses a backlight, making it harder to achieve true black, which impacts contrast and colour depth.

• OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode): Each pixel emits its own light, allowing for perfect black and a much higher contrast ratio, making colours appear more vibrant and saturated than on an LCD.

• Manufacturing Variation: No two displays are exactly alike. Slight variations in the backlight, colour filters, and internal components across different brands and even within the same model can cause visual differences in hue, brightness, and white point.

3. Personal and Ambient Viewing Conditions

The environment the image is viewed in also drastically changes its appearance.

• User Adjustments: Viewers frequently adjust their own screen’s settings (brightness, colour temperature) to their personal preference or current task, independent of your image’s actual data. Using Night Shift or True Tone modes on phones/laptops, for example, will warm the display significantly, adding an orange/yellow cast to your image.

• Ambient Lighting: The light in the room affects how your eyes perceive the screen.

• Editing in a dimly lit room can make your screen look brighter, causing you to edit the image too dark.

• Viewing a screen under warm incandescent light can make the screen appear too cool, while viewing under cool office fluorescent light can make the screen appear too warm.

Conclusion 

When you look at The myriad of obstacles in your way, you can understand that when you edit, you edit that final version for you, and you only. Of course, there is one easy way that you can share your images so that everyone sees them as they are supposed to be seen, and that is simply printing your images. 

When you show people your prints, they will see the image as it is intended to be seen, and all the factors that changed the way your images looked on other people’s screens will be gone forever.

Of course, you still have the problem with digital prints not looking the same on every screen, so the best thing to do is just understand this, and not worry. Your computer, with it’s screen and settings is the main-copy, and every other version is just that, an alternate version of your image. For many, that is hard-to-swallow after all their hard work on their images, but it is a fact, so we all have to live with it.