The best photo editing monitor is going to help you take your hobby or career to a whole new level, allowing you to showcase and alter your work in excellent quality.
While the best gaming monitors are all about refresh rates and response times, that's not really the case with the best photo editing monitors. Instead, you need to look for good colour accuracy, a wide colour gamut, and a decent size when it comes to selecting a monitor for design work.
For the best colour possible, we'd advise looking at monitors that have at least 99% sRGB or 99% AdobeRGB in their spec sheets. An IPS display is also a beneficial feature for editing work, as it can offer you improved contrast, wider viewing angles and more accurate colours.
While 4K isn't entirely necessary here, we'd say that it's always better to have a higher resolution. This is because it will provide you with a crisper, clearer picture to help you figure out whether or not your work is ready to publish.
With all of this in mind, we’ve picked out these monitors based on their specs, general reviews, and any other features that we think make them worth considering for your setup.
Best photo editing monitors
1. BenQ SW321C
Best photo editing monitor overall
We'd say that BenQ's SW321C monitor could definitely be of use to anyone making a living out of photography and photo editing.
It has a seriously impressive colour gamut, with 99% Adobe RGB colour space, 100% sRGB and 95% of DCI-P3. Added to that, it comes with AQCOLOR technology to reproduce colours more accurately.
In other words, these specs should offer you some of the best colour accuracy and vibrancy of any monitor to showcase all your hard work in immense detail.
It also comes with a 32-inch 4K display. The high resolution should add to the picture quality and the big screen size should offer you more immersion when you're in the midst of your editing work.
It also has an IPS display panel to offer you wider viewing angles and even better colour contrast.
Another useful feature, if you find yourself needing to print out your edited work, is that it has BenQ's special Paper Colour Sync technology.
With this, you can choose the colour gamut, printer model and paper type to get the most accurate representation of the image you've spent your time working on.
Customising your workspace when you're involved in artistic design work can also come in handy. Luckily, this monitor is adjustable and can tilt, swivel or pivot, as well as having the height adjusted based on your individual needs.
Read More: Best budget 4K monitors
2. ASUS ProArt PA279CV
Best 27-inch photo editing monitor
The aptly named ASUS ProArt has been designed with photo editing in mind.
Although you can get other monitors with wider colour gamuts, you're unlikely to find a Calman-verified display (shown to be particularly well-suited for editing) for less than this, as it comes at a pretty decent price.
Boasting a 100% sRGB colour space, a Rec. 709 and DCI-P3, it should be great not just for photo editing, but also for video editing and general graphic design work as well.
It has a 4K resolution, an IPS display, and, impressively, high colour fidelity to accurately reproduce images on your screen and allow you to see what your finished product will look like in more detail.
HDR10 should enhance brightness levels and colour range, allowing bright whites to appear brighter and dark blacks to appear darker.
If you're a professional photo editor, the display has a 6-axis colour control function, too, that can let you use your knowledge to adjust saturation and hue patterns.
And, if that wasn't enough, ASUS' unique ProArt Preset provides multiple modes for you to adjust the colour gamut, whether you're colour grading or manipulating photos.
Read more: Best graphic design monitors
3. ViewSonic VP2785-4K
Best HDR photo editing monitor
This monitor by ViewSonic certainly has all the specs required for photo editing, with a 4K resolution, HDR10, an IPS display panel and a 99% Adobe RGB colour space.
Essentially, all these features as a combination are designed to present crystal clear, lifelike pictures on your screen.
Also, at 27 inches with a three-sided ultra-thin bezel - meaning an almost frameless design - it should enhance your photo editing experience even further by being able to show you a larger version of your creative work.
It has an integrated colour uniformity function, too, to ensure you have consistent colour and brightness across the entire screen - from edge to edge and corner to corner.
Taking into account the fact that professional editors will use this monitor for their jobs, it has 14-bit and 3D LUTs (Look-Up Tables) to provide you with a very smooth palette selection of an incredible 4.39 trillion colours.
Alongside this, it also has a 6-Axis Colour Enhancement tool to allow you to adjust yellow, red, green, cyan, blue and magenta to whatever colour depth you'd like them to be at.
Usefully, it also comes with colour calibration reports to give you a reading of the Adobe RGB and colour uniformity, so you can keep an eye on how the monitor is producing the most accurate colours it can.
An added benefit to this monitor, too, is that it has some eye-care features. These include flicker-free and a Blue Light Filter to combat eye strain if you find yourself editing your photos for long periods of time.
Read more: Best gaming monitors under 200
4. Dell UltraSharp U3219Q
Best 32-inch photo editing monitor
A contender for one of the best 32-inch monitors, this UltraSharp monitor by Dell should make your editing experience more immersive given its large screen size and near-frameless design.
It comes with Display HDR400 that features HDR playback support, a 4K resolution, 99% sRGB colour coverage and 95% DCI-P3.
Having HDR400 means it has a brightness of 400 nits, which is pretty impressive and should allow you to experience a greater contrast in colour to help you figure out where your photos might need brightening or darkening.
Not only that, it has an impressive amount of colour depth, with an incredible 1.07 billion colours.
Also, if you want to edit different photos at the same time to bring them together later, this monitor allows you to view content from different laptops simultaneously with Picture-In-Picture and Picture-By-Picture features.
You also only have to use one keyboard and mouse to operate your setup, even when using two screens, as it has a Keyboard, Video and Mouse feature built-in.
The display can also be tilted, pivoted, swivelled or heigh-adjusted so you can edit from all angles so you can edit in a position that's comfortable for you.
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5. HP M24fw
Best budget photo editing monitor
The HP M24fw monitor might be a little smaller than the other monitors on this list, measuring in at 24 inches, but with a Full HD resolution, a frameless design and an IPS display, you shouldn't encounter many problems with showcasing your work in its entirety.
Moreover, it offers great quality in terms of colour as it boasts a 99% sRGB colour space for more accurate depths and tones when showcasing your work.
If you're a professional photographer and spend a lot of your time sitting at your computer editing, then its Blue Light Filter should help minimise eye strain, particularly during long editing sessions.
It's also the most inexpensive option on the list - again, mostly thanks to its size - so if you were looking for a photo editing monitor for a relatively inexpensive price, this may be the choice for you.
An added bonus of this monitor is that, if you're environmentally conscious and are into recyclable products, it's actually made from 85% recycled materials.
And, whilst it should be much better suited to photo or video editing work, it's worth adding that it has AMD FreeSync technology with a 75hz refresh rate.
So, just as with some of the other best 75hz monitors out there, it can be used for casual gaming, too, if that's also one of your hobbies...who doesn't love a 2-for-1 offer?
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Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Below we've answered some of the most frequently asked questions about the best photo editing monitors to try and help you out a bit if you still have any queries.
Do I need a 4K monitor for photo editing?
You don't necessarily need a 4K monitor for photo editing, as you can produce high-quality work with a Full HD or 2K display.
But, of course, with a higher resolution the picture quality will be much clearer, Higher resolution essentially means more detail, which has its obvious advantages when it comes to editing photos.
Does refresh rate matter for photo editing?
Unlike gaming monitors, refresh rate doesn't tend to matter as much for photo editing. You can easily make do with a fairly low refresh rate of 60Hz as you'll be mostly working with a still image.
Refresh rates do matter with fast-moving video, so if you're a video editor, then you may want to consider a monitor with 75hz and above.
Is a 24-inch monitor too small for photo editing?
We'd say a 24-inch monitor should be okay for photo editing, but ideally, for any sort of creative work, you'll want a monitor that's 27 inches or above.
This is because it will provide you with more screen space, which gives you a larger working area for you to split your screen, for example.
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