Lightroom Export Settings for Print and Web – Day 27

Master Export Settings

Everything you have done for twenty-six days lives inside Lightroom’s catalog as a set of instructions. The RAW file on your drive has not changed. To turn your edit into something you can send to a client, upload to a site or hand to a lab, you have to export it — and the Export dialog has more in it than most people ever touch.

Today we walk through the whole thing, panel by panel, and set up a naming recipe and a preset so that future exports take one click instead of ten.

Open the Export Dialog

With your finished image selected, go to File > Export. You will also see Export with Previous just above it, which reruns your last export settings without opening anything — useful once you have your settings dialled in, and confusing before then.

The dialog that opens is a stack of collapsible panels. Work down them in order.

Export Location

This sets where the file lands. You can point it at a specific folder, put it beside the original, or choose Choose folder later, which makes Lightroom ask you at export time. That last option is the most flexible if your destination changes from job to job.

There is also a Put in Subfolder option, and an Add to This Catalog checkbox that brings the exported file back into Lightroom as a new image — handy when you want the JPEG tracked alongside the RAW.

File Naming: Build Yourself a Recipe

This is the panel worth spending five minutes on, because it saves hours later. Tick Rename To, then — instead of picking one of the presets — click Edit at the bottom of the dropdown. That opens the Filename Template Editor.

1. Clear the existing template

   Click into the field and delete whatever is already there. You are building this from scratch.

2. Insert Filename

   Choose Filename from the Image Name section and click Insert. That preserves whatever the file is already called.

3. Type a separator

   A hyphen works well. Anything you type directly into the field appears literally in every filename.

4. Insert Custom Text

   This is the powerful piece. Custom Text becomes a field in the Export dialog that you fill in fresh on every export.

5. Click Done

   Your recipe is saved and selectable from the dropdown from now on.

With that recipe in place, exporting a colour version as export-final-color.jpg and a black-and-white version as export-final-bw.jpg is a matter of typing a different word in the Custom Text box. There are other tokens available too — sequence numbers, dates, title, and any metadata field — so you can build whatever convention your workflow needs.

File Settings

For almost everything you share, the answer here is the same:

• Format: JPEG — the universal option for clients, web and social.
• Quality: 100 — there is rarely a good reason to compress here rather than resize.
• Color Space: sRGB — this is the one people get wrong. sRGB is what browsers and social platforms expect. Export in Adobe RGB or ProPhoto and your colours will look flat and dull the moment they hit the web.

The other formats have their uses. Original copies the file untouched, which makes the Export dialog a decent way to move RAW files between drives. DNG gives you a RAW file with your edits baked into it. TIFF and PSD are for handing work to another editing program.

Content Credentials

This is a newer, early-access panel that embeds verified authorship information into the file — your name, your role, and a record that links the image back to you. You can attach the credentials to the file itself or publish them to the cloud. It is a genuine layer of provenance for your work, and worth switching on.

Image Sizing

Resize here when you want a smaller file than the original. The common case is a website: a full-resolution JPEG will load slowly, so exporting a version capped at a sensible dimension makes a real difference to page speed.

For print, do not use this panel. If you need a five-by-seven, go back to the Develop module, use the Crop tool with a 5×7 ratio, and export at full quality. Cropping to the aspect ratio lets you decide what stays in the frame; resizing here just hands that decision to Lightroom.

Output Sharpening, Metadata and Watermarking

Output Sharpening applies sharpening on top of whatever you did in Develop. If you already sharpened your image properly, leaving this off avoids doubling up and producing crunchy edges.

Metadata should be set to include everything. This is where the copyright, contact details and rights information you set back earlier in the series actually get written into the file. Stripping metadata out means an image that travels with no way of identifying you.

Watermarking stamps a logo or a line of text onto the export. It is most useful for proofs — send watermarked previews to a client, then release clean full-resolution files once the invoice is paid. We cover building watermarks properly tomorrow.

Post-Processing decides what happens after the export finishes. Show in Finder or Show in Explorer is convenient; Do nothing is fine.

Save It All as a Preset

Once every panel is set the way you want, click Add at the bottom left of the dialog and name the preset. Everything is stored — the location, the naming recipe, the format, the sizing, the watermark.

Build one for each thing you actually do. A Web preset with resizing and sRGB. A Print preset at full quality with no resizing. A Client Proofs preset with a watermark and a smaller size. After that, exporting is choosing a preset and clicking a button.

Exporting Two Versions of the Same Photo

Here is where the Custom Text field earns its keep. Say you have a colour edit and want a black-and-white version alongside it.

1. Export the colour version

   Type final-color into Custom Text and export.

2. Make the black-and-white edit

   Back in Develop, convert to black and white and adjust contrast, clarity and the individual colour channels until it works in monochrome.

3. Export again

   Every setting is still there. Change Custom Text to final-bw and export to the same folder.

Two clearly named files, same recipe, no chance of overwriting one with the other.

A Quick Reference

• Web and social: JPEG, quality 100, sRGB, resized to a sensible width, metadata included.
• Print: JPEG or TIFF, quality 100, no resizing, crop to the print ratio in Develop first.
• Client proofs: JPEG, resized small, watermark on, metadata included.
• Archiving or moving files: Original or DNG.

Keep Learning

• Day 26: Editing Photos on Your Phone with Lightroom Mobile
• How to Create a Signature Watermark in Lightroom
• Lightroom, Photoshop and Camera Raw: How They Fit Together
• How to Create Lightroom Presets

Tomorrow we build a watermark of your own and add content credentials to your images.