Lightroom Exports Look Terrible. Help!

[joshg40773663]

Hello! I am a video guy who was hired to do event photography the other night. I love the final edits I did in LR (CC 2015.8) and am all ready to export to JPEG. Then I noticed in the exported batch that the colors were very strange- they look compressed, like a lesser range of color or smaller bit. I am not the most technical with these things, but I have tried different export settings with no luck. Currently at the usual sRBG and JPEG Quality 94. TIFF produced the very same flawed image quality.

I certainly can't present these photos as they look right now. Please see attached screenshots, noticing the obvious difference in the hair and coat. (Larger darker one is the export quality). Any ideas??

Also, I know its not the display- calibrated iMac 27", and previewing final JPEGS in Apple's Preview viewer.

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

Make sure your monitor is properly calibrated. Some applications use the calibration, other do not, which can explain the difference in colors. Also, I am wondering if the man's jacket shows over-sharpening, can you dial that back and see if the jacket looks better?

[ssprengel]

Also make sure you have Remove Chromatic Aberration enabled in the Lens Corrections area.

Are you limiting file size--which ignores the quality setting?

Try these settings and see what happens, which are basically that the Quality is 100 and everything else that affects how the images looks unchecked:

[alanalain1]

Who deemed that to be the correct answer ? What a joke. If you want to see closer from how the final picture will look , view it in the library module with fraction zoom (no fit or fill that add an interpolation over the Bicubic algorythm). The develop module has a more simple rendering alorythm, misleading on how the final image will look after export vs view in Develop module. Also, it is said that sharpening and NR should only be done in a 1:1 ratio viewing mode. It's already a pain to post process, if on top of it after all the work one ends with crap on export, what a sham. Night skies will be more problematic than the usual daylight picture too, see below...

[D Fosse]

No, that is in fact the correct answer. That is very obviously a broken monitor profile. It's a textbook example.

Yes, it is said that sharpening and noise reduction should always be done at 1:1, because that is the correct way to do it. Not the problem here, but nevertheless undeniably correct. You need one image pixel represented by one screen pixel.  No scaling. I'm sure you understand that when you stop and think about it.