Export Settings

Tutorials

Why Your Lightroom Edits Look Different After Export (And the Exact Settings to Fix It)

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.

September 26, 2026

Tutorials

Why Your Lightroom Edits Look Incredible on Screen and Terrible Everywhere Else

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.

September 10, 2026

Workflow & Technique

Your Lightroom Edits Are Stunning. Your Export Settings Are Quietly Ruining Them.

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.

August 24, 2026

Tutorials

Why Your Exported Photos Look Nothing Like They Did in Lightroom (And How to Fix It)

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.

July 15, 2026

Tutorials

Why Your Exported Photos Look Nothing Like Your Lightroom Edits (And How to Fix It)

I had a client email me once asking why the headshots I delivered looked “washed out and kind of gray” compared to the previews I’d sent over iMessage. I’d spent two hours on those edits. Warm shadows, lifted blacks, a custom preset I’d built around a Gillian Welch record. They looked perfect on my screen. On hers, they looked like they’d been run through a photocopy machine. The edit wasn’t broken.

June 11, 2026

Technical Guides

Mastering Lightroom Export Settings: The Ultimate Guide to Getting Your Colors Right

Mastering Lightroom Export Settings: The Ultimate Guide to Getting Your Colors Right I used to be that person. You know the one—I’d spend three hours perfecting a portrait in Lightroom, hit export, and watch my carefully crafted colors flatten and shift the moment the image landed on my hard drive. It felt like watching your favorite song get compressed into a low-quality MP3. I was doing the creative work right, but completely botching the delivery.

March 9, 2026

Workflow

Master Lightroom Export Settings: The Secret to Perfect Digital Deliverables

Master Lightroom Export Settings: The Secret to Perfect Digital Deliverables I used to think exporting was the easy part. Finish editing, hit export, done—right? Wrong. I spent months delivering photos that looked absolutely stunning on my calibrated monitor, then watched clients complain they looked “flat” or “washed out” on their phones. The culprit? I was treating export like an afterthought instead of the final, critical step in my color grading workflow.

March 3, 2026