Your iPhone shoots in a wide colour space called Display P3. If your converted JPG looks dull, muddy, or strangely neon on a different screen, the colour profile was either stripped or misread.
iPhones shoot in Display P3, not standard sRGB. Since the iPhone 7, Apple has used a wide-gamut colour space that captures deeper reds, vibrant oranges, and richer greens than standard web formats expect.
Dropping the ICC profile makes colours look washed out. If a converter keeps the raw P3 pixel values but strips the APP2 metadata tag that labels them as P3, browsers assume the file is sRGB and dull every vibrant shade.
Converting pixels to sRGB is the safest fix for the web. Unless you know every viewer uses a colour-managed screen and browser, baking the colours into standard sRGB avoids nasty surprises.
Inside an iPhone HEIC file, the container holds a colr box that specifies the Display P3 colour space. When you turn that HEIC into an 8-bit JPG, the converter has to make a choice about what to do with those wide-gamut numbers. Note that this is purely about colour gamut; if your highlights are blowing out to flat grey or white, that is a separate issue covered in our guide to HDR and tone mapping.
A converter can handle the P3 colour data in one of three ways, and only two of them are right:
| Conversion Method | What is in the JPG | How it looks on screen |
|---|---|---|
| Keep P3 + Embed ICC Profile | P3 pixel values + <code>APP2</code> ICC chunk | Accurate on Macs, iPhones, and modern browsers; dull in non-colour-managed apps. |
| Convert pixels to sRGB | Recalculated sRGB pixel values | Consistent everywhere; extreme reds and greens are slightly clipped to fit sRGB. |
| Keep P3 + Strip Profile (Bug) | P3 pixel values, no <code>APP2</code> tag | Washed out, flat, and slightly desaturated on every screen. |
Even if a converter does everything right, you might still see a shift when moving a file from your iPhone to a Windows laptop. Two hardware and software limits cause this.
<canvas> element, the browser's rendering engine automatically translates those pixel values into the standard srgb working space before writing the JPG.You do not need expensive editing software to see if a converter stripped your colour profile. Your operating system can read the file header directly.
Cmd + I to open the Get Info window. Expand the More Info section and look at the Color profile line. It will say either Display P3 or sRGB IEC61966-2.1. If the line is missing, the file is untagged.sRGB or Uncalibrated. Note that Windows File Explorer calls Display P3 "Uncalibrated" because it only checks the basic EXIF tag, not the actual ICC profile.Cmd + I to open the Inspector. Click the General Info tab (the "i" icon) to see the exact ICC profile name embedded in the file.If your file is untagged and looks dull, you can open it in macOS Preview, go to Tools > Assign Profile, and select Display P3 to restore the original colours.
If you are uploading photos to a web form, an old content management system, or sending them to Windows users, converting the colour values directly to sRGB is the most reliable choice. Drop your file into the HEIC to JPG converter to get a clean, standard JPG without uploading your photos to a server.
Your photos are decoded in your own browser — open the converter and see.
First published: 4 November 2026