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bekalovesphotos
Participant
November 25, 2020
Question

When I export to save a photo, the saturation somehow increases after saving

  • November 25, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 369 views

After I export a photo once finishing editing, the photo saves with higher saturation somehow. Why is this happening? I have lightroom 4.0 version. What am I doing wrong?

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1 reply

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 25, 2020

You are probably viewing the exported photo in a non-color managed viewer. That means you are not seeing the correct colors.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga
bekalovesphotos
Participant
November 29, 2020

I appreciate your answer, Johan. I am now attempting to figure out what you mean by non-color managed viewer. I don't see this phrase in my export settings.

Community Expert
November 30, 2020

It means you are looking at the exported file using an application that is not color managed. The main photo viewer in Windows is not color managed for example. It means that the application does not take into account the color response of your monitor and just sends the image data straight to the display without correcting it. This is a problem as many current computer monitors are what's called wide gamut, which means they can display much more saturated colors than the internet standard called sRGB. If you run unmanaged applications on such a system, you will see oversaturated colors if you export your images to the default sRGB color space. Lightroom is color managed and does the translation for you and will show you the right color if you for example reimport the exported image. Also Photoshop and many better photographic applications are color managed and will show the right colors. In some programs you have to enable the color management in their preference settings. This problem is very common on windows machines where historically there has not been much color management in most applications. Luckily finally most browsers even on windows are color managed but many system utilities still are not.