I sent a client gallery last spring and got a message back within ten minutes: “These look kind of gray and flat? Did something go wrong?” Nothing went wrong with my edit. Everything went wrong with my export. The rich, warm tones I’d spent an hour dialing in looked like they’d been photocopied twice and uploaded through a 2009 Wi-Fi connection. I’ve been editing in Lightroom for over a decade and I still had a moment where I stared at my screen wondering if I’d lost my mind.

I hadn’t. I just hadn’t checked my color space.

The Color Space Problem Nobody Warns You About

Here’s what’s happening under the hood when your export looks wrong. Lightroom edits natively in a wide-gamut color space called ProPhoto RGB, which contains colors the human eye can barely perceive. It’s enormous. Most screens, browsers, and social platforms operate in sRGB, which is significantly smaller. When Lightroom hands off a ProPhoto RGB file to something that doesn’t know how to handle it, the conversion either gets done badly or doesn’t happen at all, and your colors collapse.

The fix is simple but it has to be intentional. In your Export dialog, under the File Settings panel, set Color Space to sRGB for anything going to a client gallery, social media, or the web. If you’re exporting for professional print labs like Miller’s or WHCC, ask them specifically, because some want Adobe RGB, which sits between the two extremes. Sending Adobe RGB to a web browser is almost as bad as sending ProPhoto RGB. Match the destination.

The Settings That Actually Matter for Web and Client Delivery

Open your Export dialog and work through this from top to bottom. Under Image Format, use JPEG for delivery. Quality 85 is not a compromise, it is the right answer. The file size difference between 85 and 100 is enormous (sometimes 3x larger) and the visible difference in a delivered gallery is essentially zero. I’ve done side-by-side comparisons more times than I can count. At quality 85, a typical full-resolution portrait file lands between 3 MB and 6 MB depending on detail and noise. That’s a manageable, professional file size.

For Image Sizing, check “Resize to Fit” and set the long edge to 2048 pixels for web galleries and social. This is large enough to look sharp on a 27-inch 5K monitor and small enough that clients can’t walk into Walgreens and print a 16x20 for free. If you’re delivering high-resolution files for print, either export full resolution with no resize, or match the print lab’s recommended pixel dimensions (most want the full file anyway).

Under Output Sharpening, turn it on. Set it to Screen for web exports, Amount Standard. Lightroom applies a mathematically calculated sharpening pass that compensates for the slight softening JPEG compression introduces. Skipping this step is why so many exported photos look just a little softer than they did in Develop. It’s not dramatic, but it’s real.

Metadata and Copyright - Don’t Give This Away

Every file you export contains embedded metadata. By default, this includes your copyright, your name, the camera settings, and depending on your workflow, the GPS location where the photo was taken. Under the Metadata panel in the Export dialog, I use “Copyright Only” for anything going to clients or being posted publicly. This strips out location data (important for portraits of families and children) while keeping your copyright claim embedded in the file.

Add your copyright information in Lightroom’s Catalog Settings under Metadata if you haven’t already. Set it up once as a default export preset and you never have to think about it again. I have a preset called “Harvest Moon” (yes, my presets are named after songs) that I built for standard client delivery. It applies every setting I’ve described here automatically.

Export Presets Are the Closest Thing to Free Time

I learned Lightroom originally because my band couldn’t afford a photographer and someone had to edit the press shots. I figured it out the hard way, one confusing YouTube video at a time, clicking through export dialogs over and over. The first time I discovered I could save an Export Preset, I felt genuinely cheated that nobody had led with that information.

In the Export dialog, once you have your settings dialed in, click “Add” in the Preset panel on the left side. Name it something specific, like “Client Web Gallery 2048sRGB” or “Instagram Square 1080.” Not “Export 1.” The name matters because six months from now you won’t remember what Export 1 does. I have seven export presets covering every scenario I run into regularly: client delivery, print lab, Instagram, Facebook (which recompresses everything anyway, so I use a different quality setting), and a full-resolution archive preset for my own backup.

The time savings compound. If you’re exporting ten galleries a month and each one used to require two minutes of clicking through settings, that’s 20 minutes a month of decisions you’re now making zero times. Not revolutionary on paper. Over a year it’s four hours and zero export mistakes.

One Setting Most Editors Never Change

In the File Settings panel, there’s an option that says “Limit File Size To” with a checkbox. Leave it off. This is a blunt instrument that overrides your quality setting to hit an arbitrary file size cap, and it does it without telling you how much quality it’s sacrificing. If file size is a concern for a specific platform, control it through the Quality slider and the pixel dimensions, not this checkbox. You want to know what your files look like before they leave your hands.

Get your color space right, your quality slider at 85, your long edge at 2048 for web, your sharpening on, and save it all as a named preset. Every export problem I’ve ever seen comes down to one of those five things being wrong.