I had a client email me last year convinced something was wrong with her monitor. Her photos looked incredible inside Lightroom, rich, warm, with this gorgeous golden-hour grade she’d spent two hours dialing in. The moment she exported and opened the files in her browser to send to a client, they looked flat. Slightly green. Wrong. Her monitor was fine. Her editing was fine. Her export settings were the problem, and they were set to Lightroom’s defaults.

This happens constantly, and it’s not a beginner mistake. It’s a settings-awareness problem. The good news is that once you understand what’s actually happening at the point of export, you’ll never second-guess your output again.

What Lightroom Is Actually Doing When You Export

Every RAW file contains more data than your screen can display. When you edit in Lightroom, you’re working inside a managed color environment. The colors you see are being interpreted and rendered in real time by the software. When you hit export, Lightroom has to bake all of that into a static file, and the choices you make in that export dialog determine how faithfully your edit survives the translation.

The two biggest variables are color space and bit depth. If you export in sRGB when your edit was built around a wider gamut, you’re essentially pouring a wide image into a narrow container. Colors clip. Gradients flatten. That warm grade you spent forty-five minutes building suddenly looks like it was done by someone who just discovered the orange-and-teal preset for the first time.

Color profile embedding is the other silent killer. If you export without embedding a profile, the application that opens your file gets to decide how to interpret the colors. Browsers, email clients, and phone galleries all make different guesses. Most of them guess wrong.

The Export Settings Worth Actually Memorizing

For web delivery, including portfolio sites, social media, and client proofing galleries, use sRGB with an embedded profile. File format should be JPEG at quality 85 to 90. Not 100. JPEG at 100 doesn’t give you a noticeably better image for screen use, but it does give you files that are 3 to 4 times larger. At quality 85 in Lightroom, a standard 24-megapixel image typically exports between 4 MB and 8 MB depending on detail complexity. That’s a reasonable size that loads fast and still holds up at full screen.

Sharpen for screen, not for print. Lightroom’s output sharpening is separate from the sharpening in your Detail panel, and for web exports I use Standard screen sharpening on most images. If you’re exporting street photography with a lot of fine texture, bump it to High. It adds edge clarity that gets softened by JPEG compression.

For print delivery or archiving work to send to retouchers, the conversation changes completely. Export as a 16-bit TIFF in Adobe RGB (1998). The file sizes will be significant, often 80 MB to 150 MB for a single image, but that’s the point. You’re handing off the full information payload your camera captured. ProPhoto RGB is technically wider, but most retouchers are working in Adobe RGB pipelines, and sending ProPhoto files to someone who doesn’t have a color-managed workflow is asking for problems.

Resolution and Long Edge Settings That Actually Matter

A lot of photographers export at full resolution for everything out of habit. For web, that’s unnecessary and creates a privacy issue, because large files retain more EXIF data and make it easier to reverse-engineer your exact shooting location and gear. For most web uses, I export with the long edge set to 2048 pixels at 72 PPI. That’s sharp enough for retina displays, small enough to load quickly, and doesn’t give away the full file.

For print fulfillment labs like Mpix or Miller’s, you want the full native resolution with no downsampling, at 300 PPI if you’re submitting a flattened TIFF. Check your specific lab’s spec sheet, because some accept 240 PPI and some require the file to be sized to the exact print dimensions. Getting this wrong costs you a reprint.

The Preset Pack Mistake That Taught Me to Build Export Presets

A few years ago I released a free preset pack that ended up with around 50,000 downloads. I was thrilled until the emails started coming in. People loved the presets, but their exported files weren’t matching what they saw in Lightroom. The issue wasn’t the presets themselves. It was that I hadn’t included any guidance on export settings, and most people were exporting in whatever Lightroom had defaulted to when they installed it.

That experience pushed me to start building export presets for every project type I work on, Web Portfolio, Client Proof, Print TIFF, Instagram Square, the whole list. In Lightroom Classic, you save these in the Export dialog by clicking Add in the preset panel on the left side. Building them once means you never manually configure an export again, and you eliminate the category of errors that comes from clicking through a dialog when you’re tired and in a hurry.

The One Color Space Decision That Overrides Everything Else

Match your export color space to the destination, not to your preference. sRGB for anything going to a screen, especially anything going online. Adobe RGB for print workflows and professional handoffs. Embed the profile every single time without exception. If you do nothing else after reading this, open your last five exported files in Photoshop, check Edit > Assign Profile, and see what’s actually embedded. You might be surprised.

Your edit lives and dies at export. Every hour you spend in the Develop module is an investment, and the export dialog is where you either protect that investment or quietly lose it in a settings menu most people click through in fifteen seconds.