Photos on my iMac vs my iPhone

[WideAperture]

Greetings! I'll get straight to it. Why the do my photos look different on my iMac (27 inch late 2013) than my iPhone (6 plus)? It's sooooooooo annoying. After retouching my photos in photoshop, I drop them in drop box then download them from the dropbox app on my phone to my phone. But they look different! Like in most instances they look brighter. So when I get ready to share them on Facebook/Instagram they are not completely how I wanted them to look. Is this an issue with my phone or iMac?

*when I email the photos to myself they look better than dropbox but still not as good as I want

 

[Light Guru]

Sounds fairly normal. Nether your iMac or your iPhone are calibrated so there is going to be a difference. You could calibrate your iMac screen but you cant calibrate the iPhone so there is still going to be some difference.

Keep in mind you cannot control the screen others view your images on so unless you are both looking at the same screen you wont have the exact same representation of the image.

 

[KmH]

There are other factors, mainly software, that will cause a difference in how photographs look on the 2 devices.

 

[TCampbell]

Photographers and graphic artists will use color-calibrated displays. I use a "ColorMunki" (by X-Rite). The DataColor "Spyder" is another. Software is installed on the Mac (or any computer really) and the device is placed directly on your screen. The software runs the display through a series of color hues and tonality while the calibration tool measures the actual color being produced by the display. Based on the results, it builds a color profile for the computer so that colors produced are accurate.