Mac to iPhone photo transfer inconsistent

[Chris T-Smith]

I've been transferring photos from my MacBook to iPhone for social media use etc by exporting from Lightroom as a JPEG and then airdropping this to my iPhone XR. This issue is that when I open the photo on my phone it comes out significantly darker with higher contrast (I've attached a photo of my computer screen and a the same photo from my phone to roughly illustrate the point) and means I have to manually adjust each photo on my phone which I'm getting fed up with doing. 

I've read a lot to try and fix this - I know about colours spaces and made sure my Mac and the JPEG are using sRGB as well as trying Photoshop to embed the profile separately but to no avail. I might be doing something simple wrong but please does anyone know how to resolve this/what settings I need in lightroom? 

[cmgap]

Can you post a screen shot of your export settings?

[Jao vdL]

First, make sure that you disable True Tone and Nightshift in your Phone's settings (Display and Brightness). Those mess with the display in a major way and if you have them turned on, you can't trust anything you see on the phone. Also the brightness seting on your phone needs to be fairly high for the contrast to be correct so play a bit with the screen brightness. Second, is your computer display well calibrated using calibration hardware? If not, you need to do that first. You can't trust your computer display otherwise. Third, there is a large part of this that you cannot completely control as the phone display is simply not calibrated. You will notice that if you send the same image to multiple phones that they all will look somewhat different even if they all have true tone and night shift disabled. Nothing you can do about this except making sure your own computer display is well calibrated and disregarding what you see on your own phone as it is not calibrated.

One thing to try is to install Lightroom on your phone and simply sync an image from Classic to the cloud. Does it look the same? Having Lightroom on your phone and syncing images from Classic is by the way a quick and easy way to share images with social media apps such as instagram that are hard to do from a computer but trivial on a phone.

[Chris T-Smith]

I'm pretty certain I've turned True Tone and Nightshift but I'll definitely double check that to make sure. Think I may need to calibrate my laptop screen though, although it's been set to sRGB so surely should be accurate for that colour space? 

That's a very good idea with Lightroom on my phone! I'll definitely be testing that out, thanks very much for all your help!

[Jao vdL]

There is no way to set a Mac book pro screen to sRGB. If you selected the sRGB profile in color management for the display than that explains the problem. This actually guarantees your display will be off. Using an sRGB profile there makes the system assume that the display is sRGB, which it is not! Most apple displays nowadays are closer to dispkayP3. They also have a different gamma curve than the sRGB curve which explains your contrast differences. If you do not calibrate you should keep the profile for the laptop display at the default which is usually colorLCD. This is a profile that is customized for your type of computer by Apple. You should really calibrate your display though! That is the only way to get a reasonably correct display on your machine regardless of who makes your computer and display. Apple's default profiles are reassembly good but still far from perfect.

[cmgap]

In looking at your screen shots it looks like one has edits and one does not. The dust spots on the lens are still visible. It also looks like the second screen shot has a preset on it. If you can post a screen shot of your export dialog box with File Settings visible we may get a clue. A little variation is expected however it looks like you've lost all edits with your export.

[Chris T-Smith]

They're both the same image just one is taken with my phone of my laptop screen to give an idea of the inconsistency between the two. I'll post my export settings in a sec when I get the chance :))

[DdeGannes]

Which image is the one from your computer?

What version number of Lightroom do you have installed on your Computer? The latest version is Lightroom Classic 11.1.