I had the same problem and I have a color corrected monitor. My images print the way they look on my screen. But exporting to Jpegs destroyed many of them.

I use ProPhoto RGB – When I export with either that of sRGB the Jpegs often look terrible.

I took some of those that looked terrible and exported to AdobeRGB they look much, much better

I have been having similar issues as well! This article has been extremely helpful in better understanding color management, but I’m still not sure how best to edit my photos so that what I see in LR is what I will get in my export (instead, I end up doing several test exports when I almost done w/ my editing). My computer’s color space is “Color LCD” (the default on my mac), and it does show Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB display profiles, but when I select those it changes the tone of the display very drastically (a significant pale blue tint), so I don’t use them. I’d love to speed up my editing time by knowing that what I’m seeing as my final edit is what my clients will receive instead of having to do so many (or any!) test exports.

Also, I wanted to put together a small photo book for a friend for the holidays, and I’m pretty confused as to how to make sure it looks like what I’ve edited. If my monitor/the display profile my computer uses is sRGB, I’m editing the photos in ProPhoto RGB (LR/PS), and I’m not sure if an online vendor (like Shutterfly) may be more likely to do the printing in Adobe RGB or sRGB, is it still best to edit in ProPhoto RGB and export to sRGB?

How does one overcome the issue of ‘images looking different/too dark’ in windows(10) image viewer? My images look perfect in Lr but as others have said, look bad or just different in windows. They seem to look ok when uploaded to facebook etc but still, it would be nice if they look correct in windows too.

I’m having the same issue and can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. I’m coming from the very old Photoshop 7 / ImageReady that I’ve been using for far too long, and am having trouble wrapping my head around how to properly use Lightroom. In ImageReady, which is where I have been doing most of my photo cropping and adjustments for photos for my business’ website (yes, ImageReady … I have a fantastic process down pat that has worked extremely well for the past 13 years or so). But I know I need to use a more modern program and have been making myself use Lightroom the past couple of months, which I purchased two years ago.

ImageReady is a what you see is what you get program … in all browsers, in all photo viewing programs in Windows, etc. This is very important for me since 99% of what I do ends up on the web for my business. However, with Lightroom, the color profiles of the exported JPEGs from the ARW (Raw Sony files) throw me off because some programs utilize the color profiles and some don’t. ImageReady, which I still use for additional image tools, and Google Chrome are two of the programs I use that do not read the color profiles of the JPEGs created by Lightroom. Chrome is the bigger concern because I use it for the web, as do many other people on my website.

I just want to flatten the color profile or discard it (or whatever the term is) so that it’s like the final images I get out of ImageReady. I don’t care about color profiles and just want the WYSIWYG experience I’ve had from ImageReady for the past 13 years.

While I’m thrilled with what I’ve been able to accomplish with Lightroom on my computer, it accomplishes nothing if all of that work in Lightroom doesn’t display properly in Chrome when viewing images from my website. Confused and frustrated!

Congratulations for your excelent article !

In Adobe Bridge I have the option of displaying the color profile of an image.
When I am editing other formats than RAW, I would like to know what color profile is embeded.

This should be possible in View / View Options…
But there no no such option.

Does someone know where can I visualize that information (the color profile) in LR ?

“have faith that the way Lightroom handles colour space works”

It doesn’t – at least not in my case. When I’m editing and viewing files in LR and then exporting them as sRGB, the color shades in shadows looks noticeably different – I’m guessing due to the color profiles conversion.

Also don’t be fooled when you open the extracted sRGB file in LR – it seems to change it – for whatever reason – for it to look like the one with the adjustments.

You can do your reality check though if you “Edit in” > “Adobe Photoshop” > “Edit a copy with LR adjustments” and then open in PS the file extracted as sRGB and the chances are, you will see noticeable differences in colors.

So if you’re doing some complex adjustments in LR with the aim for white balance to be as neutral as possible (for commercial photos for example), with lots of shadows present and with the goal for the image to be exported as sRGB, then it seems the LR’s ProPhoto RGB will do you more harm than good.

Exports (100% quality and size) always look like they have added contrast (compared to how they look in LR and PS) and it ends up losing detail in the shadows. Very frustrating.

Thanks Andrew! I needed that reality check. 🙂 … Yes, I have decided to set Photoshop and ACR to match Lightroom to Pro Photo, then save the image to the colorspace of it’s intended use.