Preview changing the exposure of my photos when editing

Hi there


Since I bought my new iphone16, when I share my photos to my imac and then crop or copy them in preview, it is automatically changing the exposure of my image. How do I stop that? Thanks for your help!

iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18

Posted on Jan 13, 2025 4:32 PM

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4 replies

Jan 14, 2025 11:37 PM in response to Applepieandbananas

Applepieandbananas wrote:

do you know of a quick work around? From what I’ve read we need to screenshot them????

My previous reply was FYI because personally I have not experienced such issues when doing basic edits to images and movies with Lightroom and Final Cut Pro.


But I did notice that Sequoia QuickLook and Preview.app do change image brightness when scrolling through them -- sometimes the 1st image is another brightness but when scrolled to another image, the brightness very clearly changes until scrolling is started again.


In my recent quick test I did not find a clear pattern and I did not go through all permutations with image types (.jpg, .png, .tif etc) and their numerous available color profiles.


I would NOT advocate screenshots as a workaround because that is very lossy. Instead, you might try if adjusting color profiles or something in your workflow might help. You can do that in Preview > Tools > Assign Profile. Or GraphicConverter > Browser > General Metadata > Metadata Specifics > Replace Profile w/o matching (Legacy) (works for .jpg and .tif, and with the latest GC beta also for .png and .psd). Also with exiftool you can check, extract and insert color profiles as batches without editing the actual pixels.


But backup and do a test before doing that in a larger scale.

Jan 14, 2025 11:09 AM in response to Matti Haveri

Thanks Matt, have gone down that rabbit hole & it makes a little more sense for the little that I know. However most are saying their imagery is darker. Mine is brighter & it’s only since using the new 16promax phone camera that this has happened. I’m not full time image editing - do you know of a quick work around? From what I’ve read we need to screenshot them????

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Preview changing the exposure of my photos when editing

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