Why Your Image Colors Change in a PDF
Image colours look different in a PDF because the colour profile that came with your photo did not travel into the PDF with it. The pixel values are unchanged — the instructions for reading them are missing, so a wide-gamut photo gets read as ordinary sRGB and looks flatter.
After converting, each file tells you exactly which route it took and what came out.
🔒 Private by design: your images are converted in this browser tab and never uploaded.
What changed is the label, not the pixels
A JPEG or a PNG is a grid of numbers. A pixel that reads 237, 28, 36 is not a colour yet — it becomes one only when something decides which colour space those numbers belong to. That decision travels inside the file as a small tag called an ICC profile: sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB and so on.
Our converter puts a JPEG's own bytes into the PDF untouched, and re-compresses a PNG losslessly, so every pixel value arrives intact either way. What it does not do is carry the ICC profile across. The image lands in the PDF as plain device RGB with nothing attached, and a viewer with no profile to go on falls back to something close to sRGB. Same numbers, different instructions, different-looking photo.
That makes this an appearance change, not a data change. Nothing was crushed or compressed twice, and it is fixable. It is a common limitation rather than a bug: PDF has no requirement to carry an image's ICC profile, and plenty of lightweight converters leave it behind. We would rather tell you here than let you find out at a print shop.
Why image colours look different in a PDF but fine in Photos
Your photo viewer reads the profile and shows the picture as intended. The PDF viewer has no profile, so it reads wide-gamut numbers as if they were ordinary sRGB numbers. Wide-gamut spaces stretch the same 0-255 range over a bigger set of real colours, so reading them as sRGB pulls everything inwards and the saturated end of the image loses its bite.
| Profile the image carries | What tends to happen in the PDF |
|---|---|
| sRGB | Nothing. Most screenshots, web images and older camera JPEGs are sRGB and come through unchanged. |
| Display P3 (iPhone captures since the iPhone 7) | Reds and greens go flat, skies and skin tones lose a little life. This is the common case. |
| Adobe RGB (many DSLRs, plenty of scanners) | Greens and cyans go dull and slightly grey. |
| ProPhoto RGB (a Lightroom export set to the wrong space) | Obvious flattening, sometimes a visible hue shift. |
| CMYK TIFF from a print workflow | TIFF cannot go into a PDF as-is, so it is decoded and re-encoded once on the way in. Expect a shift, and treat the result as a preview rather than press-ready art. |
HEIC, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP and SVG are decoded and re-encoded once for the same reason, and no profile is carried through there either. If you shoot HEIC on an iPhone, the HEIC to PDF converter is the same engine, but it solves the format question, not the colour one.
How to check what profile your image is carrying
- macOS. Open the image in Preview and press Command-I for the inspector. The general tab lists the ColorSync profile. If it says Display P3, you have your answer.
- Windows. Right-click the file, choose Properties, then the Details tab, and look at Color representation. It is a blunt instrument: sRGB means sRGB, and Uncalibrated usually means the file carries something else. For the profile name itself you need an image editor or a viewer like IrfanView.
- iPhone or iPad. Photos will not tell you. Assume anything shot with the built-in camera on an iPhone 7 or later is Display P3.
- A quick test instead. Put the original and the PDF side by side on the same screen. Duller but equally sharp means colour. Soft or blocky as well means a resolution problem, which is a different fix.
Convert to sRGB before you convert to PDF
sRGB is the safe common denominator. If the image is already sRGB going in, the PDF matches what you saw.
The important word is convert, not assign. Converting recalculates the pixel numbers so the picture keeps looking the same in the new space. Assigning just relabels the numbers you already have, which produces exactly the dull result you are trying to escape. A menu item that says assign profile is not the one you want.
- Photoshop. Edit, Convert to Profile, sRGB IEC61966-2.1. Or File, Export, Export As, and tick Convert to sRGB.
- Lightroom. In the export dialog, set Color Space to sRGB.
- Affinity Photo. Document, Convert Format / ICC Profile, then pick sRGB.
- GIMP, free. Image, Color Management, Convert to Color Profile.
- A whole folder. ImageMagick does it in one line if you have an sRGB profile file to hand: magick photo.jpg -profile sRGB.icc photo-srgb.jpg. That converts only if the file already carries a profile. If it does not, the same command assigns instead of converting, so name the source profile too: magick photo.jpg -profile DisplayP3.icc -profile sRGB.icc photo-srgb.jpg.
Then drop the converted files into the converter on this page. Whether you feed it JPG or PNG affects file size and transparency rather than colour, and that trade-off is covered in PNG or JPG for a PDF.
If the shift is small and the PDF is for an email, a claim form or your own records, it is fine to do nothing. Not every colour difference is worth a workflow.
Check the PDF in the viewer that will actually be used
Untagged images are a judgement call, and PDF viewers make that call differently. Acrobat, macOS Preview, Chrome's built-in viewer and a phone's preview can each show the same file with slightly different warmth or saturation, so there is no single correct rendering to check against.
Check where it lands. If the client opens everything in Acrobat, look at it in Acrobat. If it is going to someone's phone, mail it to yourself and look on a phone. If it is going to a printer, keep reading.
Before a paid print run, ask for a proof
Do not send a job to press on the strength of a screen. Ask the shop for a proof, a physical sample printed from the same file on the same stock, and pay for it. It costs a fraction of a bad run and it is the only honest answer to whether the printed colour will match.
It is also worth being blunt about what this tool does not do: no CMYK conversion, no colour management, no PDF/X or PDF/A output, no overprint or ink-coverage handling. If your printer has asked for CMYK, a specific output intent or PDF/X-4, a browser converter is the wrong instrument and no setting will change that. InDesign, Acrobat Pro and Affinity Publisher are built for it.
For print jobs that hinge on detail rather than exact colour, the companion guide on making a 300 DPI PDF covers the resolution half of the same problem.
When to skip this tool entirely
If colour fidelity is the whole point of the document, use a colour-managed application rather than any browser tool, ours included. On a Mac, Preview will export a PDF in a couple of clicks, but it gives you no colour controls, so treat its output the same way you would treat ours. Acrobat Pro, InDesign and Affinity Publisher are the ones with real colour management and far more control.
Come back here when the priorities are the ones this converter is built for: nothing uploaded anywhere, no account, no watermark, and a JPEG's own bytes going into the PDF untouched.
Doing this on an iPhone
The Image to PDF app converts photos, HEIC, TIFF and documents entirely on the device, with no internet connection needed, and it is free with a Premium upgrade for unlimited conversions. It is tuned for small, shareable files: it resizes photos to 1200 px wide and re-encodes them at JPEG quality 0.8. That makes it a good tool for scans, receipts and paperwork, and the wrong one when the colour has to be exact. For colour-critical work, convert the image to sRGB on a computer and use the browser converter here, which keeps your original JPG and PNG data intact.
