JPG colors displaying incorrectly in messenger app

[alexa_pille]

Whenever I send jpgs to my clients through the Upwork messaging app, the colors are changed. They are made much more bright, almost neon, even though I'm working in a muted color scheme. See the screenshots attached.

I'm a graphic designer/illustrator, so it's important to me and my clients that these images display correctly. When I email the files or view them on my computer, they appear normal, so I don't believe it's an issue with the color settings of my file.

Anyone else experience this and found a solution?

[kochubei_valeria]

Hi Alexa,

Are you referring to the way an image is previewed within Upwork Messages? If you click on it and it's opened in a separate tab, do the colors show correctly?

[alexa_pille]

Hi Valeria,

Yes, both the message itself and when I click into it have the incorrect colors. Furthermore, when I download the image from the tab onto my computer and then open, it is also discolored. 

Even more strangely, at first it was just for one client, now it is affecting another client. I'm using the same file formats I always have. 

[kochubei_valeria]

Thanks for following up, Alexa.

We've looked into this with our engineers and this is what they've shared. The actual image is not modified by Upwork Messages, but it does display with wrong colors in the browser. That's due to Chrome (and other browsers) not correctly displaying CMYK images. Downloading the image and viewing it in appropriate software displays it correctly. They also suggested converting images to sRGB when saving as JPEG in order for them to display correctly in a web browser.

[alexa_pille]

Thank you, that worked!