When a client says the skin looks orange on their phone

You send a proof gallery after an afternoon of balancing skin tones across mixed reception light and open shade. A few hours later the email arrives: "We love the expressions, but the skin looks a bit orange on my phone."

Before you open the catalog and start dragging the temperature slider, stop for a moment. Between your calibrated desk and the client's sofa, the image passes through three places where colour can change: the file, the screen it lands on, and your own monitor. Only one of them is about your edit.

Start with the file

Colour spaces exist so that different devices agree on what a given red or green should look like. The standard default is sRGB, defined in the international standard IEC 61966-2-1.

Adobe's Lightroom Classic colour management help describes sRGB as relatively small and used by many web browsers, and says plainly that you can export using sRGB if you're going to share photos online. Adobe RGB covers a larger range, including some cyans and blues sRGB cannot define. Adobe points to it for printable colours. In a browser it can work against you.

The reason sits in the W3C colour specification. CSS Color Module Level 4, still a draft, says browsers should treat an untagged image, one with no colour profile, as sRGB. A file with an invalid profile is treated the same way. So if an Adobe RGB export loses its profile somewhere along the way, the browser reads those numbers as if they were sRGB, and the photo can look flatter and less saturated than the one you approved.

The check takes a minute. In Lightroom Classic the colour space is chosen in the Export dialog, File Settings panel. For proofs, set it to sRGB and save that as your proofing preset, separate from whatever you send to a print lab.

Then the screen in the client's hand

If the export is right, look at the phone.

Apple's support page says True Tone is on by default on newer iPhones and adjusts the colour and intensity of the display to match the light around it. Separately, Night Shift moves display colours toward the warmer end of the spectrum, and when it is scheduled it runs from sunset to sunrise by default. Both sit in Settings > Display & Brightness.

Put those together with a client opening the gallery at nine in the evening under a warm lamp, and the phone may be adding warmth to a file that was neutral when it left you. Not every client has Night Shift switched on, so treat this as the first question to ask, not the answer.

And your own monitor

Your baseline can drift too. The same Adobe help page notes that monitor performance declines over time and suggests recalibrating and profiling it every month or so, ideally with a colorimeter and software rather than by eye.

If your display has slowly picked up a cool cast, you may have warmed the edit to compensate without noticing. A calibration run takes that variable off the table before you change a single file.

A reply to send before you re-edit

Don't open with ICC profiles. A short note that helps the client rule things out works better:

Thank you for letting me know, I want the skin tones to look natural to you. Phones often adjust screen colour to the room: on iPhone, True Tone and Night Shift can make photos look warmer, especially in the evening. Could you open the gallery on a computer, or check it once with both switched off in Settings > Display & Brightness? If it still looks too warm there, I'll adjust the files.

If the tones still look heavy on a neutral computer screen, export two or three frames with the warmth pulled back, add them to the gallery next to the originals, and ask the client which pair they prefer.