An "Oh no I dove too deep" deep dive on Monitor tech and settings for photo editing.
I take the technical aspect of photography far too seriously, some would say I spend more time worrying about settings and specs than I do actually taking photos. Those people would be me, and those people would be right. But some of the things I obsess over are important, and one of them is almost certainly monitor settings.
So let's say you just bought a fancy new camera, shoots in RAW even, and it can display 14 whole bits of color, obviously now you have to make sure you have a monitor that matches those specs? wrong, you idiot, why would you think that? idiot, dumb idiot.
Here's what matters, Panel type... And color space percentage, and delta E's, and luminance, and dynamic range, and glossy vs matte screens, and back light tech. Easy stuff. So let's get right into it :)
Panel Type:
There are four you have to really worry about here, TN (don't buy this), VA (eh), IPS (good), and OLED (stop showing off Mr. Moneybags). 99% of you will want to make sure you buy an IPS panel monitor. These will be the most color accurate, and the best at reproducing the "truest" image, and the reason is... not important, they're just better, trust me. VA can be okay too, but they can sometimes be too contrasty, or have some muddy colors, so just do your research before deciding that a VA panel is right for you. OLED can be incredible, but OLED is a tough one because of current OLED tech. WOLED (White OLED) is probably going to be your best bet right now for photography, but a good OLED panel can be expensive, and you have to start worrying about Burn-In (It's not as bad as people say) and other potential OLED issues, you also have to worry about the fact that your monitor will produce SUCH GOOD BLACKS that you might actually lift your blacks a bit thinking they are too dark, which will result in other viewers thinking your image is a bit flat. Either way, IPS or OLED is a good place to be.
Color Space:
most of the internet thinks sRGB is the best thing you could ever look at. Most of the internet is wrong, but unfortunately you have to cater to the internet if you want to post on social media, this means you're best off ensuring that your monitor is capable of showing 100% sRGB color spectrum. Better if it can do more. adobe RGB is a somewhat outdated color space that I wouldn't worry too much about for your monitors anymore, but something that is important is DCI-P3 (sometimes called Display P3). It's very similar to sRGB but has about 26% more color space than sRGB, which results in being able to see more colors. The internet is slowly learning that people like more color, so having a monitor that displays 100% DCI-P3 is a good idea, unfortunately this is still currently pretty expensive, so anything displaying 90+% is pretty good. Unless you are editing professional movies, don't worry too much about being able to clamp specifically to Rec 2020 or Rec 709, but do understand your medium, and use a monitor capable of displaying proper colors.
CALIBRATION:
Use a physical hardware "Colorimeter" such as a Calibrite or Datacolor SpyderX to make sure your screen shows you the right colors. That way, you aren't editing incredible photos on your monitor, only for them to show up a little too green, or a little too pink on every other screen. On some of the fancier monitors they will state that they are precalibrated (This is better than nothing, but not great). If you see something like that, ensure that it says it is guaranteed to have "<2 Delta E", this will be good enough to start.
Luminance:
This is straight up just your brightness (It's not just that, but that's as deep as we're going to go). Get a monitor that can get real bright if you want to edit in HDR, and then also deal with all the software limitations that HDR brings when you try to upload HDR images to the internet, get kinda mad, and then go back to editing photos in standard dynamic range because the internet just isn't ready for HDR, try it again in 2026. But for real, if you want HDR, you want your monitor to be able to display like 1600 Nits, it's a lot, it's really expensive, and it's really bright. Honestly may be better off just using a MacBook Pro screen for this. If you're a normal person, you want your display to be able to display at least 120 nits. Or "120cd/m²" (I'm not going to get into the difference between Luminance (nits), Lumens (Luminous Flux), and Lux, you can go down that particular deep dive on your own if you'd like. (It's crazy though, I recommend it).
Dynamic Range:
This is just the ratio between the darkest part of your image, and the brightest. It's possible that a monitor with a really low contrast ratio can still get really bright, but the dark portions will also be really bright, usually due to limited backlight segments, or just cheap tech in general. This monitor would be bad for HDR, even though it gets really bright. These monitors literally do not support HDR so it's not too difficult to make sure you don't get one of these if you're searching for an HDR editing monitor.
Screen: Glossy vs. Matte?
Matte monitors are extremely widespread, most monitors are in fact, matte. few are glossy, you're more likely to find a glossy monitor if you're looking for an editing or "art" based monitor, or in the Mac world. These monitors will have the effect of having deeper blacks, but they technically don't. Matte screens will ever so slightly wash the colors out, but they really aren't the end of the world. If you have the ability, I recommend buying glossy if you intend to mostly edit photos in a controlled environment. Matte if you are going to constantly move around (such as go to coffee shops). A wonderful middle ground to this is the newer "Nano Texture" from Apple, kind of a "best of both worlds" situation.
Back Light tech:
Back lights are a fickle thang. You're really only going to come across two options nowadays, LED, or ...no backlight at all (OLED). But LED options are almost endless. You'll have "zone backlight" which has multiple backlights that can turn on and off depending on where they're needed. You have "edge-lit" which is just backlights on the edges of the screen, often just left and right edges. You even have some fancy ones like "mini-led" and "micro-led". (These are the best choices, but expensive). These are nice because they are as close to OLED that an LCD panel will get, literally the LEDs are really small, so you can get extremely local backlighting that results in a nice contrast ratio due to having the darker portions actually dark (since they don't have a backlight turned on). Long story short here, you want to have as many backlights as physically possible, you might see "512 full array", which means there are 512 individual backlights, that's pretty dang good. Some even have more than 1000 nowadays, but if you see something like "edge-lit" or "local dimming" just know that even though it's not the end of the world, you'll likely have a little bit less dynamic range, due to the back light brightening up dark portions of your images that are close to lighter portions that require that backlight to turn on. Oh, and I wouldn't even try to find a real life Micro LED panel in the wild, they seem to just be a dream we all want to come true, but never really does.
Ultimately, your monitor is an important choice for your photo editing journey, but as I have to remind myself time and time again, what's more important is just using your camera to take pictures, and actually learning how to compose, edit, and visualize the art you love to make. So, worry about your monitor a little bit, but don't let it stop you from creating a bunch of images that you won't get around to editing.