Color profiles determine how colors in your designs will render, which helps maintain their accuracy across different displays.
Choosing between sRGB and Display P3
Depending on your project and the devices you’re designing for, you may want to work in sRGB or the Display P3 color profile:
sRGB
Using sRGB as your default color profile is a good choice if you’re mostly designing for web, or for a wide variety of displays. Modern web browsers follow W3C standards and use sRGB as their color profile. All phones, Macs and most screens can display these colors.
Display P3
Display P3 is better if your work contains many videos or photos. It also allows you to make use of more vibrant colors when designing for devices that support the Display P3 color profile (like all modern iPhones).
Keep in mind that you’ll need a wide gamut display to see Display P3’s brighter and more vibrant colors. Learn more
Setting a default color profile
Sketch supports sRGB and Display P3 color profiles. Sketch uses sRGB by default, but you can easily switch to Display P3 by heading to Sketch > Settings > Canvas and selecting Display P3 from the Color Profile dropdown menu.
You can change your default color profile in the Settings panel
In version 90 and earlier, the default color profile was set to Unmanaged, which meant we’d use your display’s settings but export as sRGB. From version 91 onwards, we’ve removed the Unmanaged option. All documents that previously used this profile now use sRGB by default.
Changing a document’s color profile
You can also assign a color profile to a specific document. Open a document in the Mac app and head to File > Document Settings > Canvas and select sRGB IEC61966-2.1 or Display P3 from the Color Profile dropdown menu.
You can change an existing document’s color profile via document settings
Assigning vs converting color profiles
When you select a different color profile for a document, you can either Assign or Convert it.
If you Assign a new color profile to a document, Sketch will keep the same RGB values between color profiles. Some colors in your document may change slightly, especially the brighter colors. Unlike the Convert option, this won’t change the underlying RGB values, which means you can switch back and forth as often as you like without losing color data.
If you choose to Convert your document to a new color profile, its underlying RGB values will change but the output will look as similar as possible on the Canvas and exported images.
Take extra care when you convert a document from Display P3 to sRGB, because the Display P3 color profile renders brighter colors than sRGB. If you convert to sRGB, some colors will look less bright — and converting from sRGB back to Display P3 won’t bring this brightness back.