I used to send edited photos to clients and then immediately text them to ask if the files looked okay. Not because I was being thorough. Because I genuinely wasn’t sure what they were going to see on their end. The colors I’d spent an hour coaxing into something cinematic would land in their inbox looking flat, oversaturated, or weirdly greenish depending on what device they opened them on. It was embarrassing, and for a while I thought I was just bad at editing.

I wasn’t bad at editing. I was bad at exporting.

The Gap Between Your Monitor and Everyone Else’s Screen

Here’s what’s actually happening. When you edit in Lightroom, you’re working in a color-managed environment. Lightroom is interpreting your image using a color profile, typically either Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB, which are wide-gamut spaces that can represent a huge range of colors. Your monitor, if it’s halfway decent, is probably displaying sRGB or something close to it. When you export without embedding the right color profile, the receiving device doesn’t know how to interpret those color values, and it makes its best guess. That guess is almost always wrong.

The fix sounds almost too simple: in your export dialog, under “File Settings,” set the Color Space to sRGB. Every time. For nearly every use case involving screens, web, social media, client delivery, or printing through a standard lab, sRGB is correct. The wider color spaces are for print workflows where you’re handing files directly to a print technician who knows what they’re doing. If that’s not you, sRGB is your default from now on.

The Settings That Actually Matter in the Export Dialog

Open your Export dialog (File > Export, or Shift+Command+E on Mac, Shift+Ctrl+E on Windows) and work through these fields with intention.

Image Format: JPEG for delivery, TIFF if you’re handing off to a retoucher or printer who needs maximum data. JPEG is fine for 98% of workflows. The idea that you always need to hand off TIFFs is a myth that mostly just wastes everyone’s storage.

Quality: Set to 85. Not 100. Quality 100 in Lightroom produces files that are 3 to 4 times larger than Quality 85 with differences that are genuinely invisible to the human eye at normal viewing sizes. A full-resolution portrait at Quality 85 runs roughly 8 to 12 MB. At Quality 100, that same file can hit 25 to 35 MB. For a gallery of 50 images, that’s the difference between a 500 MB delivery folder and a 1.7 GB one.

Color Space: sRGB, as discussed. Do not touch this again.

Resolution: 300 PPI for print, 72 PPI for web. This one is slightly misunderstood. PPI doesn’t change the actual pixel dimensions of your file. It’s metadata that tells a printer how to interpret the size. For web images, the browser ignores it entirely. What matters for web is pixel dimensions, not PPI.

Resize to Fit: For client web galleries, I export the long edge at 2048 pixels. This is large enough to look sharp on a Retina display and small enough to load fast. For social media, 1080 pixels on the long edge is sufficient for Instagram. Going larger doesn’t improve quality on the platform because Instagram recompresses everything on upload anyway.

Sharpening, Metadata, and the Stuff People Skip

Output Sharpening is worth using. Lightroom’s develop-panel sharpening is meant to compensate for the softness introduced by your camera’s sensor. Output sharpening is a second pass designed specifically for the output medium. For screen use, select “Screen” and set the Amount to “Standard.” For print, select “Matte” or “Glossy” depending on your paper, at “Standard” or “High.” It adds maybe 30 seconds of thought to your export process and visibly improves edge definition.

Metadata is something most people ignore until it bites them. Under the Metadata section in the Export dialog, you can choose what information travels with your file. For client delivery, I use “Copyright Only.” This strips GPS coordinates, capture notes, and Lightroom-specific develop settings from the file. Your client doesn’t need to know what lens you used or where you were standing. More importantly, embedding your full develop history in a JPEG you’re posting publicly is just unnecessary data exposure.

The Preset That Took Me a Weekend and Ended Up Free

A few years ago I spent most of a Saturday and Sunday building out a full export preset pack. Different presets for web galleries, Instagram, print labs, and client proofing. Each one named after a song because I name everything after songs, it’s a whole thing. I put them up for free download mostly because I thought maybe a few hundred people would find them useful. They got 50,000 downloads in the first few months.

What I learned from the comments and emails that followed is that almost nobody had thought carefully about export settings before. People were exporting at Quality 100 in Adobe RGB and wondering why their photos looked different on their phone than on their computer. The settings I’d considered basic turned out to be genuinely useful to a lot of working photographers. So I stopped assuming any of this was obvious.

Save your export configuration as a preset. Once you have settings that work, click “Add” in the bottom-left of the Export dialog and name it something you’ll actually recognize. “Instagram 1080” or “Client Delivery Web” beats “Export Preset 3” every time.

One Setting to Check Before Every Single Export

Before you hit Export, look at the Color Space field one more time. I’ve been doing this for years and I still catch myself about to export a client gallery in Adobe RGB because I’d been experimenting with a print workflow earlier in the session. One glance, every time.

The export dialog is the last thing that happens to your image before it leaves your hands. Everything you built in the develop module can be undone in seconds by a wrong setting here. Get this right and your work will actually look like your work.