Colour That Doesn't Travel: Why Your Screenshot Looks Wrong on Someone Else's Screen

Every designer and photographer has had this email. 'Love the layout — but the brand blue is coming through sort of purple on my laptop?' You open the file. It is blue. Unambiguously, unarguably blue.

Most of the time nobody is lying. You are both looking at the same numbers, and those numbers are being translated differently at each end.

A screenshot is a set of numbers, not a colour

Pixels don't contain colours; they contain values. Something has to explain what those values mean. That something is a colour profile — a set of instructions describing which actual, physical colour a given RGB triplet should produce on a given display.

For years the safe assumption was sRGB. Almost everything spoke it, so the same triplet looked broadly the same everywhere. Then phones, laptops and monitors started shipping wide-gamut panels capable of showing deeper reds and greens than sRGB can even describe. It's lovely to look at. It also quietly broke the assumption.

A screenshot taken on a wide-gamut display captures the RGB values as your screen is currently rendering them. If the file carries your display's profile, a colour-managed app can translate it back into something sensible. If the tag is missing — which happens constantly — the receiving app falls back to sRGB and has a guess. Often the guess is close. Occasionally your carefully chosen coral arrives as a traffic cone.

The usual suspects

Wide-gamut screenshots. macOS tends to tag screenshots with the display profile; Windows is less consistent and third-party capture tools vary wildly. Send one of those to someone on an untagged sRGB laptop and saturated colours get shoved around.

Untagged exports. Any image without an embedded profile is assumed to be sRGB. If yours is actually Adobe RGB or Display P3 underneath, everything vivid will look wrong to someone.

Apps that ignore profiles entirely. Plenty of image viewers, older Android galleries, a fair few email clients and any number of Windows utilities just render raw values and hope. Colour management is not universal, and it never has been.

Social platforms. Upload an image and it gets re-encoded, sometimes converted, sometimes stripped of metadata. Instagram, Facebook and X have all changed their handling over the years; none of them promise fidelity, and none of them tell you when they've had a go at your file.

Brightness and ambient light. A phone at 80% brightness on a train is not a proofing environment. Neither is a glossy laptop screen next to a window at four in the afternoon in November.

Gamuts, briefly

sRGB is the lowest common denominator and still the safest target for anything published on the web.

Display P3 is wider, used across Apple devices and many recent Android phones. Great for showing off, unhelpful as a screenshot to send a client.

Adobe RGB is wider still and largely a print-workflow space.

CSS now offers newer spaces such as color(display-p3 …) and oklch(), and they're genuinely pleasant to work with. But support — and, more to the point, the colour management setup of whoever is on the other end — isn't guaranteed. Use them with sensible fallbacks and test on something cheap and unglamorous.

What to do before you hit send

1. Decide what you're actually sending. If the recipient needs the artwork, send the file, not a screenshot. Screenshots are for flagging layout problems, not settling colour decisions.
2. Convert to sRGB, don't assign. Converting maps the colours into the new space; assigning merely relabels them and shifts everything. In Photoshop it's Edit → Convert to Profile. In Affinity, Document → Convert Format / ICC Profile.
3. Embed the profile. A small checkbox in every export dialog known to humanity. Tick it every single time.
4. Check on a second screen. Not a calibrated one — the opposite. A mid-range Android phone at default brightness is a decent proxy for what most people will see.
5. Include something to anchor to. A swatch of a colour the client already knows, or the logo sitting in the same frame, gives their eye a reference point instead of an absolute judgement.
6. Say the colour space out loud. 'These are sRGB JPEGs — they'll look flatter in some apps' heads off half the replies before they arrive.
7. For web work, test in Safari and Chrome. Safari on macOS is arguably the most colour-managed of the mainstream browsers; Chrome and Firefox handle tagged content well these days but still differ on untagged files and images without profiles.

The honest version

There is no way to guarantee a colour looks identical on every screen. Most screens are uncalibrated, plenty are running some vivid or 'cinema' preset out of the box, and a good number of apps don't colour-manage at all. That's not a solvable problem.

What is solvable is the self-inflicted stuff: untagged files, wide-gamut exports sent to an sRGB audience, screenshots standing in for finished deliverables. Clear those out and you're left with the ordinary vagaries of other people's hardware, which nobody can be blamed for.

Aim for 'predictable everywhere' rather than 'perfect here'. It's the more realistic goal, and it's the one that quietly stops the emails.