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The left picture is the uploaded picture to Facebook, center picture is exported jpeg from photoshop and opened using Windows Photo Viewer, and right picture is open in Photoshop still. The center and right picture look exactly the same in respect to color in Lightroom. To me, the picture uploaded to facebook looks better, not worse. Most people have been having the issue of pictures looking worse when uploading online. I personally think the colors look great in the picture uploaded to facebook.

What I'm wondering is, why do my pictures not look the same across the board?! I'm sure I will have an experience that one time I upload a picture to Facebook or somewhere online and the picture not coming looking good. How can I have more consistency?



It is not possible to tell from a screenshot what Facebook did to your picture, but I would not be surprised if it converted it from ProPhoto RGB to sRGB. Tablets and phones usually do not have color management and everything that is not sRGB looks bad. The tones might get shifted in the process and possibly look more punchy after such conversion.

How can I have more consistency?

Always export as sRGB for the web.


The images look different because of different color spaces.

To fix it stop using ProPhoto RGB color space and instead use sRGB to produce consistent results for web. Secondarily, determine if your browser is capable of managing color spaces and find out what it is using.

Also, ensure your monitor is properly calibrated using a hardware solution.

  • This isnt really answering the question is it... – Digital Lightcraft Aug 20 '15 at 7:38

Depending upon the browser you're using, you may not be comparing apples-to-apples (or jpegs-to-jpegs in this case). Facebook added the .webp compression for uploaded photos a while back and displays them in that format within browsers that support WebP.

Details on the WebP format are available at: http://www.sitepoint.com/webp-image-format/

A good image quality comparison between jpeg & webp images is available at: http://davidwalsh.name/webp-images-performance

Just something to look into. Hope this helps; or at least eliminates a possibility if doesn't apply to your situation.


Facebook applies a pretty aggressive compression and resize to the uploaded images to save space and bandwidth. This should not change colors (it actually does, but adding artifacts, not changing tones), unless the source image has an "unsupported" color profile for the compression library. I experienced some color issues while compressing JPEGs made with Lightroom and Photoshop with the ProPhoto RGB profile.

In any case, Facebook, and many other socials, work with a very large amount of images, resulting in a poor quality storage. As a (minor) workaround, you can create HD albums in Facebook, preserving some of the original quality.

EDIT To have some consistency you should be sure the same color profile has been set in any of your image viewer/editor, although this may not always be a choice.

  • Yes I saved this with adobe prophoto option enabled so not sure what's exactly going on since just like you said they compress the photos. But the difference between these images is insanely differentiable! I usually do upload only as HD quality but this was an upload to someone's wall and I did not have a choice. I wish there was a better work around for this. @lympatus – ayounis90 Aug 20 '15 at 1:14

Exporting from Lightroom or Photoshop should convert the image to sRGB for Web consumption. The reason you may see the same image differently in Lightroom, Photoshop, and a Web browser may lie in several factors:

  1. Whether the image is converted to sRGB or not
  2. The browser used, not all browsers are color managed
  3. Display calibration and profiling, which is a must for any serious photographic work.

Depending on your workflow any combination of the above may create a different look. If you have a display monitor that can display Adobe RGB or close to it, it may not display the colors correctly if the image display software is not color managed. To further complicate the matters, the Web standard seems to be to have the images converted to sRGB but not tagged, you will see that in Photoshop save for Web screen too.

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