I set my Studio Display to sRGB, so why are pics from my iPhone still converted to P3?

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Level 1

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I set my Studio Display to sRGB, so why are pics from my iPhone still converted to P3?

The other day I found out how to set my 2026 Studio Display to sRGB, but with a lower brightness than the standard 80 nits.

Excellent, I thought, because now I won't have to set the colour space on every image when I want to publish on the interwebs, or just send something to my friend via Signal.

WRONG! 😢 For some reason, when AirDropping a photo taken on my iPhone 17, it is still converted to P3. That doesn't make any sense to me, because that wasn't the case when I used my 2017 iMac.

Plz help 🤡

Posted on Aug 31, 2026 6:08 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

PreCognition

Level 6

8,656 points

Aug 31, 2026 6:36 AM in response to Naiera

Setting the Studio Display to the Internet and Web (sRGB) reference mode only changes how the display presents color. It doesn’t convert the color profile of files you AirDrop to the Mac. Apple describes that preset as an sRGB viewing/reference mode for web-content workflows.

So a photo from your iPhone can still arrive tagged as Display P3 even while you’re viewing it on an sRGB-calibrated display. That part is expected.

If the final file itself needs to be sRGB for a website or another service, you still need to export/convert that image to sRGB in the app you’re using. Changing the display preset can’t do that conversion for you.

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Answer 2

Naiera Author

Level 1

11 points

Aug 31, 2026 6:44 AM in response to PreCognition

Thank you very much for this reply.

What confuses me about how this works is that everything was fine on my iMac from 2017. Same phone, same transfer method, same editing software (Image Viewer, or whatever exactly the name is in English), and I didn't need to set the ColorSync profile for images for them not to look really bad when viewed in Firefox or sent via Signal.

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