Help with editing photos to be viewed on various devices

Hi! The frustration you're experiencing is quite common among photographers and graphic designers, mainly due to the variations in device displays and color profiles. Here are several tips that can help you achieve more consistent photo editing results across different devices:

1. Calibrate Your Monitor: Start by calibrating your desktop PC monitor. This ensures that your monitor displays colors as accurately as possible. Calibration devices like the Spyder or ColorMunki can be very useful.
2. Use Standard Color Spaces: When editing, use standard color spaces like sRGB, which is the default color space for the web and many consumer devices. This won't eliminate all discrepancies, but it should reduce them as sRGB is designed to look decent on most devices.
3. Adjust Brightness and Contrast: Try to match the brightness and contrast settings of your display to typical conditions. Many devices are set to higher brightness by default, which can alter how an image looks.
4. Soft Proofing: If your editing software supports it, use the soft proofing feature. This allows you to see how your photos will look on various devices or under different lighting conditions.
5. Consider Export Settings: When saving or exporting the final edited image, pay attention to the file format and quality settings. Higher quality settings and appropriate file formats (like JPEG or PNG for web use) can make a difference in how images are rendered on different devices.

By following these steps, you can minimize the variability in how your photos appear across different devices and ensure that your edits retain their intended effect as much as possible.

Use a calibrated and profiled monitor set to the appropriate white point for your working environment. Monitor white should be a visual match to paper white (unless you very specifically target HDR conditions). Use a color managed workflow with embedded color profiles.

Then you know the file is correct.

Next, convert to sRGB and embed the color profile.

That's it. Done. Then you have delivered optimally from your end.

How other people set up and configure their systems and devices , that's forever out of your control. That's their responsibility and their problem; not yours. Phones don't have full color management. They are usually able to handle incoming color profiles and convert them to the same baseline, but from there it's all to the wind and all over the map. Nothing you can do about that.

Keep in mind that even if a given display is way off, the user will see everything that way. If it hasn't bothered them before, it won't when seeing your images either.