Why do my photos look different online?
Your photos usually look different online because of a colour-space mismatch: an image exported in a wide-gamut space like Adobe RGB or ProPhoto, shown without conversion, renders dull and desaturated in browsers and apps that assume sRGB. Convert to sRGB and embed the profile and most of the shift disappears. The rest is screens — but the colour-space part is the one you (and your delivery platform) can actually fix.
The main cause: wide-gamut files on an sRGB web
Cameras and editors can work in wide colour spaces (Adobe RGB, ProPhoto) that hold more colours than a typical screen shows. The web, and most phones and apps, assume sRGB. If you deliver a wide-gamut file and the viewer ignores its profile, the colours get squeezed into sRGB incorrectly — reds go orange, greens flatten, skin tones shift. It looks like your edit “changed” when nothing about the pixels did; they’re just being interpreted wrong.
The fix is to convert to sRGB and embed the sRGB profile on export for anything web-bound. That’s what the viewer expects, so what they see matches what you exported.
The second cause: the delivery platform re-processing
When you upload, most platforms generate their own smaller “derivatives” for fast viewing. If that pipeline isn’t colour-managed — if it strips or mishandles the ICC profile — it can introduce a shift even from a correct sRGB file. This one isn’t your fault and you can’t fix it in your export; it’s the platform’s job. What colour-managed delivery means →
The third cause: screens (mostly out of your hands)
Uncalibrated monitors, phone displays, brightness, and “vivid” screen modes all change how colour looks. You can’t control your client’s phone. What you can control is not adding a shift on top — so nail the colour-space handling and the screen variance is all that’s left.
The checklist
- Export web/delivery copies in sRGB, profile embedded.
- Deliver through a colour-managed platform that converts derivatives to sRGB rather than mangling them. Here’s why that matters →
- Keep your wide-gamut masters for print; just don’t ship them to the web.
CuratePics runs a colour-managed (sRGB) delivery pipeline, so what your client sees matches what you exported. See how it works →