A large-scale psychophysical experiment was performed to establish the important image appearance attributes controlling the perceived quality of images presented on a large display under dark surround conditions. Six image appearance attributes were chosen: Colorfulness, contrast, naturalness, visual information, sharpness, and image quality. A nine-point qualitative category scale was used to rate these six attributes for eight test images, each of which had 22 derivative images which varied in lightness, chroma, and sharpness. The influences of the three image manipulations on the six attributes, and the psychophysical relations between image quality and its constituent attributes were investigated. Multiple regression and factor analysis were conducted to derive an empirical image quality model. It was found that there were high correlations among the five attributes forming image quality: Between sharpness and contrast, and between naturalness and visual information. Furthermore, colorfulness, contrast, and naturalness were key attributes to have a significant impact on image quality.