The Best Monitors for Photo Editing in 2022

Shopping for a panel for painstaking photo work? Photographers and other graphic and multimedia artists—whether professionals, students, or enthusiasts—are concerned with translating what’s on the screen to a print, a photo book, or a web site with accurate color reproduction, and they have their own set of priorities and wants in a monitor. Whether you spend all day in Adobe Photoshop and other, similar creative applications for a living, or just tinker with landscape photos in your spare time, buying the right display for color-correct work will pay off many times over, versus simply snagging the seemingly nicest panel on sale at your local electronics mart.

Color accuracy, and understanding the technical terms and specs around it, are the keys to buying the best photo editing monitor for how you work. There is no single best monitor for photography; it depends on whether you’re a graphics pro or just dabbling, and what the ultimate destination for your photos is. But with our help, you can find the right fit for your budget, and for what you do with your images after they leave your camera. We’ve laid out our top tested picks below, followed by a buying guide to monitors for photo work, and concluding with a big spec breakout of all our favorite models.

More About Our Picks

Best Monitor Overall for Editing in Multiple Color Spaces

Bottom Line:

ViewSonic’s VP2785-4K is a prime-pick monitor for video editors, photographers, and other graphics pros, packing great color accuracy and factory calibration for a host of color spaces.

Pros

• 4K UHD resolution.
• Good selection of ports, including USB-C.
• Covers 99 percent of the Adobe RGB color palette and 95 percent of DCI-P3.
• Highly adjustable stand.

Cons

• No built-in speakers.
• HDR effect is relatively modest.
• No adaptive sync support.

Asus ProArt PA34VC Professional Curved Monitor

Best Curved, Ultrawide Monitor for Creative Pros

Bottom Line:

The curved, ultra-wide Asus ProArt PA34VC is a good choice as a monitor for creative professionals. It also touts gaming features such as a 100Hz refresh rate and support for AMD’s FreeSync adaptive-sync technology.

Pros

• Excellent color accuracy.
• Software calibration tools.
• Ultra-wide screen with 100Hz refresh rate, 1900R curvature, and HDR support.

Cons

• Does not cover the full Adobe RGB color space.

HP 24mh 23.8-inch 1080p FHD Monitor

Best Budget Monitor for Casual Editing

Bottom Line:

HP’s 24mh IPS-based budget monitor is surprisingly feature-rich for its price, packing three inputs, a stand with ergonomic chops, and built-in speakers. Plus, the panel delivers a high contrast ratio and stellar sRGB color coverage for the money.

Pros

• Excellent sRGB color coverage
• High contrast ratio for an IPS monitor
• DisplayPort, HDMI, and VGA connectors
• Stand supports height, pivot, and tilt adjustment
• Built-in 2-watt speakers

Cons

• Warranty limited to one year
• Brightness fell short of its rating

Ultimate Monitor for Creative Pros on Macs

Bottom Line:

Apple’s Pro Display XDR provides exceptional color accuracy and build quality at a price that’s quite competitive with those of reference-grade pro monitors. It’s exquisite enough that swallowing the wildly extravagant cost of its Pro Stand is worth it.

Pros

• Exceptional color accuracy.
• DisplayHDR 1600 looks incredible.
• High contrast ratio.
• Sturdy build.
• Beautiful design.
• Functionality with Windows in Boot Camp, or with specialized broadcast-workflow hardware.

Cons

• Super-expensive stand.
• No input alternatives to USB-C.
• Matte-panel version costs $1,000 more.

BenQ PD3220U DesignVue Designer Monitor

Best 4K Monitor for Video Production Alongside Photo Editing

Bottom Line:

The BenQ PD3220U DesignVue Designer Monitor provides a winning combination of a large screen, UHD resolution, good color accuracy, and a host of convenience features as a professional monitor for designers, videographers, and photographers.

Pros

• Good color accuracy.
• Ergonomic stand supports height, tilt, swivel, and pivot adjustment.
• Large screen.
• UHD (4K) resolution.
• Improved HotKey Puck controller.
• Built-in KVM switch.

Cons

• Does not cover the full Adobe RGB color space.

Dell UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor Monitor (UP2720Q)

Best 4K Monitor With Automatic Color Calibration

Bottom Line:

The Dell UltraSharp 27 4K PremierColor (UP2720Q) is one of the only monitors in its price range with a built-in calibration tool, which automates and simplifies the task of preserving a panel’s color accuracy.

Pros

• Includes integrated calibration tool
• Very good color accuracy results
• Dual Thunderbolt 3 ports
• Intuitive OSD navigation
• Height, tilt, swivel, and pivot control

Cons

• Pricey
• Does not include the CalMAN software it integrates with
• Low brightness for a professional monitor
• Tested contrast ratio considerably lower than its rating

Dell UltraSharp 27 4K USB-C Monitor (U2720Q)

Best 4K Monitor for Web Producers

Bottom Line:

The Dell UltraSharp 27 4K USB-C Monitor (U2720Q) is a color-accurate 27-inch 4K display with good ergonomics, a solid port selection, and a slightly steep price tag.

Pros

• UHD (4K) native resolution
• Good color gamut coverage
• Solid port selection
• Supports height, tilt, swivel, and pivot adjustment

Lenovo ThinkVision P32U-10

Best Business Monitor for Heavy Image Work

Bottom Line:

Lenovo’s ThinkVision P32u-10 is a winner, whether you think of it as a productivity monitor with exceptional color accuracy or as a professional monitor with a slew of convenience features.

Pros

• Large, high-resolution 4K screen
• Exceptional color accuracy for sRGB and Adobe RGB
• Dual Thunderbolt 3 ports let you daisy-chain monitors
• Full range of ergonomic features

Cons

• Pricey
• Poorly designed on-screen display (OSD) controls

Best Business Monitor for Creative Workers

Bottom Line:

Although the MSI Summit MS321UP lacks some of the features of videoconferencing and docking-station monitors, it does well as a pure play as a productivity display for creators with a bright, high-contrast screen and excellent color coverage.

Pros

• Spacious 4K IPS display
• Excellent sRGB and DCI-P3 color coverage
• Bright with high contrast
• Renders HDR content
• Attractive design

Cons

• Fairly pricey
• Doesn’t pivot between landscape and portrait modes

Best Photo Editing Monitor for Tight Workspaces

Bottom Line:

Acer’s ConceptD CM2241W is small and relatively low-res for a content-creation monitor, but it offers accurate colors. It’s a good choice for space-strapped photography students and junior creative pros.

Pros

• Bright panel
• Great color accuracy
• Full set of ergonomic features
• Nifty wood-tone base

Cons

• No USB Type-C port
• Expensive for a 24-inch monitor

Monitors for Photo Editing 101: How to Buy the Best

Wide-gamut monitors, which let you select from a palette of more than a billion colors, are the cat’s meow when it comes to photography, although it is important that they adequately cover the particular color space(s) that you will be using. If you’re working with a 14-bit or 16-bit RAW file, you’ll want to get a display that can show you the subtleties contained within each image you capture.

Nowadays, a digital connection such as DisplayPort, Thunderbolt 3 (with Thunderbolt 4 on the way), USB-C (typically carrying a DisplayPort signal), or DVI is standard, but you will want to match up your panel with the output of your PC or Mac. Look for a display with an in-plane switching (IPS) panel and least an 8-bit lookup table (LUT); it will be able to pull images from a palate of 16.7 million colors. (More about IPS and screen types in the next section.) Moving to a top-end panel with a 10-bit LUT expands that number to more than a billion—generally speaking. To achieve that number, though, you’ll need a high-end display designed for photographers, but be prepared to pay premium dollars.

(Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

Screen Technology: IPS Rules

The vast majority of LCD panels geared toward photographers and graphic artists use IPS technology, though a select few models like the LG OLED48C1 are beginning to gravitate toward OLED as 2022 trundles on. IPS has several advantages over other commonly used LCD hardware technologies such as twisted nematic (TN) and vertical alignment (VA). It offers wide viewing angles (up to 178 degrees for both vertical and horizontal); these are the maximum angular distance from looking in front of a screen to looking from the side (or above) without a change of brightness or shift in colors. IPS displays tend to have better viewing angles than VA panels, and much better ones than TN panels.

Also, IPS panels are known for having the most accurate colors of the three. IPS panels in monitors designed for creative professionals tend to have higher color depth (up to 10 bits; these are the panels that can chose from a palette of more than a billion colors) than most TN or VA displays, and support a wider color gamut, often covering all—or nearly all—of the Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 color spaces. VA panels may cover the sRGB space but not much more, and TN displays have even more limited color coverage.

(Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

For now, at least, IPS panels rule the roost when it comes to photo editing, though it may not be that way forever. One promising technology is organic light-emitting diode (OLED), which seems to do well at displaying colors, but is quite expensive. OLED is used mostly on select laptop screens and on smartphones, but it hasn’t made much of an inroad into standalone monitors—yet.

How to Assess Color Spaces and Color Coverage

A color space is a defined range of colors. An important factor in evaluating a professional monitor to be used in photo editing is determining which specific color spaces you will be working in, and what percentage of colors in a given color space the monitor is capable of showing. Common color spaces cited in display manufacturers’ specs include sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI-P3, NTSC, and Rec.709. Photographers will be most interested in sRGB and Adobe RGB, as they were developed with photos and still images in mind.

First, though, a bit about the other, more cinema-oriented color spaces. Professional monitors are often calibrated for one or more of these spaces in addition to sRGB and (in some cases) Adobe RGB, and creative artists may work with video as well as photos. DCI-P3 was defined by the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI)(Opens in a new window), a consortium of major motion-picture producers. It is geared toward digital video projection. NTSC, developed by the National Television Standards Committee (NTSC), covers a gamut similar to Adobe RGB. And Rec.709, a standard for HDTV, is widely used in video projects. Its color space is identical to that of sRGB; the difference is in their tone response curves (aka gamma) to account for differences in ambient light. (TVs tend to be used in darker settings, while computer monitors are often set up and used in brighter rooms.)

Most professional monitors have dedicated picture modes—accessible through the panel’s onscreen display (OSD)—for sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3, and we test their color coverage in all three modes. If you are purely a photographer, or a photo editor, you can ignore the DCI-P3 results, but they will come into play if you work with video.

(Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

Whether you primarily use sRGB or Adobe RGB depends on how you show your photos to the world. If your images are all to be posted online, a monitor that displays the full sRGB color spectrum is fine. sRGB is the standard color space for the web and many other applications. Even though Adobe RGB has a wider range of possible colors—sRGB encompasses only about 70% of the Adobe RGB gamut—websites will not be able to display the additional colors. What’s more, if you do upload art saved in Adobe RGB to the web, it will be automatically converted to sRGB, with the colors often looking duller than if you had shot it or saved it to sRGB in the first place.

That said, Adobe RGB does have a considerably wider color gamut than sRGB, and savvy photographers may be able to coax a more vivid range of colors when printing Adobe RGB images, whether they’re outputting their own prints or working with a commercial service. They will want a monitor that will display them to full advantage. Many monitors cover both bases, touting near-100% coverage for both sRGB and Adobe RGB. With those monitors, if you need to switch color spaces, you simply change the mode via the OSD.

Understanding Color Accuracy

A monitor’s color accuracy—how close a displayed color looks to the way it is intended—is determined by a measurement known as Delta E (dE, for short). It represents the difference between the hue of a displayed color and the input that the monitor received. The dE figure that appears in monitor specs—reflecting dE2000, the current standard—is the average of a large number of individual color readings from across the spectrum. The lower the value, the more accurate the color. You don’t necessarily need the best monitor for color accuracy in every respect, but you want one that excels in the specific color spaces that make sense for your photo work.

Most professional monitors come pre-calibrated with a dE of less than 2 for sRGB, and often for Adobe RGB as well. Depending on the colors involved, a dE of less than 2 would be hard for an untrained observer to discern, while a dE of less than 1 would be imperceptible to most anyone without specialized measuring equipment.

In evaluating professional monitors, we use the ColorChecker function in Portrait Displays’ Calman 5(Opens in a new window) color calibration program to measure the dE for a given color space. Below is an example of the results (in this case, for a Lenovo ThinkVision P32u-10 panel when we tested it in Adobe RGB mode)…

The chromaticity chart on its right shows the position of the individual color measurements, while the bar chart at far left depicts the Delta E for each point. All of the bars are short, with no points more than 2 and many less than 1. Below that chart are the figures for the average and maximum dE; the average dE of 0.88 for this monitor is excellent, i.e., it passed with flying colors (so to speak).

A few professional displays have built-in calibration tools, and some will ship with an external colorimeter that you drape over the monitor to calibrate it. The latter, typically, shows a series of color patches and uses software to create an ICC profile to properly adjust colors.

When that hardware is combined with a separate ICC profile for your printer and paper type, you can use soft proofing tools, like those found in Adobe Lightroom ($9.99 per month at Adobe), on your display to see how your prints will look on paper. If your LCD doesn’t ship with a calibration tool, consider getting a Datacolor Spyder(Opens in a new window) or an X-Rite i1(Opens in a new window) calibrator. You’ll want to calibrate your monitor at least once every 30 days.

What Kind of Finish Should I Get in a Photo Editing Monitor?

Matte displays have an anti-glare coating. They can be calibrated more accurately, and they tend to show a truer image versus the more popular high-gloss displays, which give colors an oversaturated look. Plus, you won’t have to deal with as many reflections. Fortunately, you can find many monitors with anti-glare screens to choose from.

(Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

Depending on your work environment and just how critical your work is, you also might consider a display with a hood. A hood will block ambient light that comes at your display from the sides and top, so you won’t have to worry about light, say, coming in from a window affecting how your display looks at different points in the day.

You can find third-party generic hoods for notebooks and for the iMac, but for the best fit, you’re better off opting for a display that has a dedicated hood from the manufacturer included, or available as an accessory. Fortunately, many professional monitors do.

Ergonomic Features to Look For

Most professional monitors have stands that support some combination of the standard ergonomic comfort features: height, tilt, swivel, and pivot control.

(Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

Pivot control lets you rotate a monitor 90 degrees on its stand joint, from landscape up into portrait mode, and back. It’s handy if you tend to work with photos in this kind of vertical orientation.

Pivot control also offers a surprise fringe benefit, in that when you swing the monitor up into its portrait orientation, it makes it easy to access the ports. On many displays of this kind, the ports are downward-facing in back and would otherwise be hard to reach, particularly considering that some photo-centric monitors are on the large and heavy side.

Do You Need a 4K Monitor for Photo Editing? Size and Resolution

Go with as big a display as your workspace and budget can afford, and one with an appropriately dense resolution. Remember that a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel monitor is only 2 megapixels—if you’re shooting with a 20-megapixel SLR, that’s nothing. Thankfully, this will come naturally when looking for one that hits the other features. Most 27-inch models suited for graphical work feature at least a 2,560-by-1,440-pixel native resolution, but 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) models are now widely available.

Also, keep in mind that pixel density—how closely the pixels are spaced, as measured in pixels per inch (ppi)—is an important factor in determining how sharp a monitor’s displayed image will look. For a given resolution, the larger the screen size, the lower the pixel density will be. We recommend that a monitor used for photo editing have a pixel density of at least 100ppi. As an extreme example, with a 32-inch screen and “6K” (6,016-by-3,384-pixel) native resolution, the Apple Pro Display XDR has a phenomenal pixel density of 216ppi. Of course, monitors with such ultra-high resolutions have rarified prices, as well.

Depending on your workflow and desk space, you may want to consider a secondary display, too, regardless of what you choose as your primary LCD. iMac users, for example, can load up the majority of Lightroom’s tools on the iMac’s glossy 27-inch display to browse through catalogs and make adjustments, while viewing a full-screen version of the image they’re working on using the second monitor, or vice versa. But we wouldn’t go smaller than 24 inches in that scenario.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

So, Which Monitor Should I Buy for Photo Editing?

Those are the high points—obviously you’ll want to read some reviews in detail before investing in a display for your personal photography work or business. Just consider how often you print and how demanding your clients are—these are good guidelines to figure out how much you want to spend on a display. If you are a hobbyist who prints occasionally and shares many photos online, or a student learning the ropes, you won’t need to spend for a top-end model that a high-end wedding photographer needs, who counts on perfect prints to put food on the table.

Reflecting our suggested, tested monitor picks up top, below we’ve outlined their key specs in a big breakout table. Roll on down and check ’em out!