Just realized I was using the wrong color profile for my whole portfolio

I was at a digital art meetup last month and a guy looked at my work on his iPad and said it looked way different than mine. I laughed it off at first but then he showed me the same piece side by side and I swear the sky was purple on his screen and blue on mine. Turns out I'd been working in sRGB and posting everything in Adobe RGB without converting. All those showcases I submitted to over the past 2 years probably looked like garbage on other people's monitors. Nobody tells you this stuff when you start out. Has anyone else had a similar oops moment with color settings messing up their exhibitions?

3 comments

3 Comments

roberts951mo ago

Blame the tools all you want but your viewers aren't looking at your workflow charts.

sarah8181mo ago

Oh man, I feel this so much! It's like we get so caught up in the details of how we do things that we forget who we're actually talking to. I totally get where @ivanross is coming from too, because there's a fine line between sharing your process for your own sake and actually connecting with people who just want to see the cool stuff you made. My kids do the same thing when I show them how I organized the pantry - they just want to know where the snacks are, not the color-coded system I used! Sometimes we creators just need a reality check that our audience is here for the fun, relatable stuff, not the technical nitty-gritty. It's a hard lesson to learn, but you're right that we shouldn't blame the tools for missing the mark with our viewers.

ivanross1mo ago

Let me ask you this - what exactly are they looking at then? Because if its just the final product and they dont care how you got there, why are you even talking about your process at all? Its like when people get defensive about using Blender vs Maya or whatever. The audience sees the end result, not the journey. So if your workflow charts are taking up space that could be showing actual progress or behind the scenes work, thats a problem. Maybe the real question is whether you're making content for other creators or for your actual viewers.