Methods are disclosed for ambient light-adaptive display management. Given an input image, image metadata, an ambient-light signal, and parameters characterizing a target display, a processor generates an ambient-light adjustment function which maps input luminance values in a reference viewing environment to output luminance values in a target viewing environment, wherein the target viewing environment is determined based on the ambient-light signal. The ambient-light adjustment function is applied to the input image and the input metadata to generate a virtual image and new metadata. A tone-mapping function based on the new metadata and target display parameters is applied to the virtual image to generate an output image. The parameters for the target display are computed based on the ambient-light signal, global dimming metadata, and the luminance characteristics of the target display.