How to Export Photos in Lightroom Classic: Presets, Sizing & Watermarks

The Last Step, and the One That Protects Everything Before It

This is the final part of our free Intro to Lightroom Classic series. Your photos are imported, culled, edited and batched — and none of that has produced a single file anyone else can open. Lightroom stores edits as instructions in its catalog; exporting is what turns them into actual images.

The Export dialog looks dense, but there are only a handful of settings that matter, and once you’ve saved them as presets the whole thing becomes a right-click. We’ll build three: full-size masters, web-sized uploads, and watermarked client proofs.

Start by Filtering to What You’re Exporting

Press \ for the Library Filter bar (or View › Show Filter Bar), click Attribute, and select the labels you used during culling — red and yellow in this series. Select all with Cmd/Ctrl + A, then File › Export, or Shift + Cmd/Ctrl + E.

Export Location

You can hard-code a destination, but Choose folder later is the more flexible option — Lightroom asks where to put the files at the moment you export, which suits a folder structure organized per shoot.

Tick Add to This Catalog. The exported files then appear back in Lightroom automatically, so you can see exactly what you sent. Under Existing Files, Ask what to do saves you from silently overwriting a previous export.

File Naming: The Setting Everyone Skips

This is the difference between an output folder you can read at a glance and one full of identical filenames.

Tick Rename To, choose Edit, and build a template. Clear the default, insert Filename, then type a suffix by hand — -Full Size, -1200px, -Client Proofs. The dialog previews the result as you type. You can add date tokens too, though filename plus a purpose suffix is usually enough.

Six months later, a folder of files ending in -1200px tells you instantly what they are and where they were headed.

File Settings

The format list covers JPEG, PSD, TIFF, PNG, DNG and Original. Original and DNG export your untouched RAW files; everything destined for the web, a client or a printer wants JPEG.

Quality at 100 is fine for masters. Set Color Space to sRGB. The web assumes sRGB, and exporting in Adobe RGB or ProPhoto is the single most common reason colors look flat or wrong once uploaded — our Color Space Explained tutorial covers why.

Image Sizing and Output Sharpening

For full-size masters, leave resizing off entirely.

For anything going online, tick Resize to Fit and choose Long Edge. Long Edge is the setting worth knowing: it handles portrait and landscape frames in one go, sizing whichever dimension is larger. 1200 pixels is a sensible default — sharp on most screens, fast to load, and not large enough to be worth stealing.

When you downsize, tick Sharpen For: Screen with Amount set to Low. Reducing an image always softens it slightly, and a low screen sharpen puts back exactly what the resize took out. Leave sharpening off for full-size exports.

Metadata: Keep Your Copyright Attached

Set Metadata to include all of it. In the first episode we built a metadata preset that stamps your name, copyright status and website into every file at import. Stripping metadata on export throws all of that away at the exact moment the file leaves your computer.

Watermarking for Client Proofs

Most client work involves a review round — you send a selection, they pick favorites, you finish those and deliver. Images sent during that round are unpaid work sitting on someone else’s computer, and photographers do lose them that way.

A proof watermark is deliberately different from a portfolio watermark:

1. Tick Watermark and choose Edit Watermarks

   Bottom of the export dialog.

2. Type your name or handle

   Or load a PNG or JPEG logo if you have one.

3. Make it large

   A discreet corner mark is right for a portfolio and useless as protection. For proofs, push the size right up.

4. Center it

   The anchor grid sets position. Dead center is the point — a corner watermark crops off in seconds.

5. Lower the opacity

   Enough that the client can still judge the photograph, opaque enough that nobody would publish it. Skip the drop shadow.

6. Save it as a named watermark preset

   Something like “Large Watermark Center Client Proofs”, so it’s a click next time.

Proofs should also be resized to 1200px on the long edge, and they need no sharpening. Full-size files go out only when the job is done.

Saving Export Presets

Everything above is worth setting up exactly once. With your settings configured, click Add at the bottom left of the export dialog, put the preset in a named folder, and save it.

Build the three that cover almost every situation:

• Full Size Images — JPEG, 100, sRGB, no resize, no sharpening, filename + -Full Size.
• 1200px — JPEG, sRGB, long edge 1200, screen sharpen low, filename + -1200px.
• Client Proofs — long edge 1200, no sharpening, large centered watermark, filename + -Client Proofs.

From then on you never open the full dialog: select your photos, right-click, Export, and pick the preset straight from the menu. Lightroom asks only where to put them.

It All Comes Back to the Folder Structure

Here’s where the whole series joins up. Back in part one we built each shoot as a dated, named folder containing Capture, PSD and Output. Every export in this tutorial goes into Output, in its own subfolder:

• Output / Full Size Images
• Output / 1200px Images Web, Portfolio, Instagram
• Output / Client Proofs
• Output / Color and Output / Black & White from earlier in the series

Because Lightroom’s folders mirror your hard drive, that structure exists in both places at once, and the filename suffixes make each folder self-describing even outside Lightroom.

It is more setup than dragging files to the desktop. The payoff arrives a year later when a client emails to say their hard drive died — and you find and resend their full-size images in under a minute.

Where Exports Go Wrong

Exporting in the wrong color space

Adobe RGB or ProPhoto uploaded to the web renders dull and shifted. sRGB, every time, for anything going online.

Sending full-size files during review

Unwatermarked, full-resolution images before payment. Proofs are for reviewing, not for using.

A watermark small enough to crop out

If it sits in a corner it isn’t protection. Large and centered, or don’t bother.

Stripping metadata on export

The copyright you set at import only helps if it survives the export.

Skipping the filename suffix

Three folders of identically named JPEGs is a problem you create for your future self in the moment it costs nothing to avoid.

Set It Up Once

Export presets are the highest return-on-effort setting in Lightroom. Twenty minutes building three of them removes a decision you would otherwise make on every single job, and removes the chance of getting the color space wrong at the last step of an otherwise careful edit.

Build them on your next shoot. After that, exporting is a right-click.

Quick Reference: Keys, Menus and Settings

• Pick the photosView > Show Filter Bar > Attribute, red and yellow labels; Cmd/Ctrl + A
• Open ExportFile > Export or Shift + Cmd/Ctrl + E
• Every presetChoose folder later, Add to This Catalog; JPEG, Quality 100, sRGB, All Metadata
• RenameRename To > Edit: Filename token plus -Full Size, -1200px or -Client Proofs
• Web sizeResize to Fit: Long Edge, 1200 pixels; Sharpen For: Screen, Amount: Low
• Watermark proofsWatermark > Edit Watermarks: Size up, center Anchor, Opacity down, Shadow off
• Reuse a presetAdd (bottom left) to save it; then right-click a photo > Export > preset name