I sent a client gallery last spring that I was genuinely proud of. Warm tones, clean shadows, that particular shade of golden-hour amber I’d spent forty minutes dialing in. She wrote back confused. The images on her phone looked flat, slightly green, and nothing like the previews I’d shown her. Same files. Different world.

That was a color profile mismatch, and it cost me a reshoot conversation I did not want to have. Export settings are the last mile of your editing workflow, and most people treat them like a checkbox instead of a craft decision.

The Silent Culprit: Color Space and Why It Quietly Ruins Everything

Here’s what’s actually happening when your exports look wrong. Lightroom edits in a wide-gamut internal color space, and your monitor, your client’s phone, and the internet all have opinions about how to interpret that data when you hand them a file. If you export in the wrong color space, you’re essentially writing a letter in one language and assuming everyone can read it.

The two spaces you’ll deal with most are sRGB and Adobe RGB. sRGB is the standard for screens, social media, and web delivery. Adobe RGB has a wider gamut, meaning it can represent more colors, and it’s the right choice when you’re sending files to a professional print lab that explicitly requests it. If you export in Adobe RGB and your client opens it in a browser or on their iPhone, the colors will look desaturated and weird because most consumer software doesn’t know how to handle the wider gamut correctly. It just… guesses.

The fix: always export sRGB unless a specific vendor tells you otherwise. In Lightroom’s Export dialog, under File Settings, set the Color Space dropdown to sRGB and check “Limit File Size To” only if you’re delivering web-sized images. For professional print work, ask your lab first, then adjust.

JPEG Quality and the 80 Percent Rule

The quality slider in Lightroom’s JPEG export goes from 0 to 100, and for years I defaulted to 100 because it felt like the responsible thing to do. It’s not. A quality setting of 100 does not mean “perfect.” It means “very large file with diminishing returns.”

At quality 80, a standard portrait file runs roughly 3-5 MB and retains all the detail a client or social platform will actually render. At 100, that same file can balloon to 20 MB or more with almost no visible difference at normal viewing sizes. I tested this by exporting the same image at 80, 90, and 100, then zooming to 200% on a calibrated monitor. The difference between 80 and 100 was nearly invisible. The difference in file size was not.

For client deliverables: quality 80-85, sRGB, no sharpening applied inside Lightroom if you’ve already sharpened in the Develop module. For social media: quality 70-75 is fine and keeps your uploads snappy. For print: export as TIFF at 16-bit, which preserves all your tonal data without lossy compression touching it.

Resolution, PPI, and the Confusion Between Screen and Print

PPI (pixels per inch) only matters when a device needs to calculate a physical print size. For screens, it’s irrelevant. A 72 PPI image and a 300 PPI image displayed on a monitor are identical if they have the same pixel dimensions. I still see photographers resizing to 72 PPI for web delivery as if that protects their work or speeds anything up. It does neither.

What actually matters for web: pixel dimensions. Instagram displays images at a maximum of 1080 pixels on the long edge. Exporting a 6000-pixel-wide file and trusting Instagram to resize it means you’re letting their algorithm make compression decisions that you could have made better yourself. Export at 1080 pixels on the long edge, quality 75, sRGB. Your colors will land correctly and the file will upload in seconds instead of minutes.

For print, 300 PPI at the intended print size is the actual target. A 4x6 at 300 PPI needs to be 1200x1800 pixels. A 16x20 at 300 PPI needs 4800x6000. Do the math before you export, not after the lab calls you.

File Naming and Metadata: The Details That Save You Later

A file named “DSC_04872_final_FINAL_v3_USE_THIS_ONE.jpg” is a crime I’ve committed personally. Lightroom’s export dialog includes a File Naming section that lets you build templates using tokens: date, sequence number, custom text. My current naming structure is ClientName-YYYYMMDD-001, which sorts cleanly, tells me exactly when and who without opening the file, and never produces a duplicate.

On metadata: if you’re delivering to clients, strip your proprietary editing metadata by unchecking “Write Keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy” and selecting “Copyright Only” under Include in the Metadata dropdown. You keep your copyright embedded, but you’re not handing over your entire keyword taxonomy and edit history. If you’re submitting to stock libraries, read their specific metadata requirements before you export, because they vary and some will reject files that don’t meet them.

The Preset That Saved Me an Hour a Week

About two years into writing tutorials, I built out a full preset pack for a specific moody, film-inspired look. Took me most of a weekend. I named every preset after a Townes Van Zandt song because that’s what was on the record player. Then I gave the whole pack away for free, mostly on a whim. Fifty thousand downloads later, I started getting questions about how to export the looks correctly, which made me realize that export settings were the missing half of every preset tutorial I’d ever written.

So I built an export preset inside Lightroom’s export dialog, something most people don’t know exists. In the Export dialog, after configuring all your settings, click “Add” in the lower-left panel under Export Presets. Name it, save it, and from that point on your entire export configuration is one click. Separate presets for web, for print, for client delivery. The time savings add up fast.

Your edit is only as good as how it arrives. Get the export right, and your work finally looks like your work.