Lightroom Not Exporting Edits

Question

I just spent the last hour reading through forums about my issue, and unfortunately there are about three-years'-worth of conversations with no resolutions for this problem. When I toggle between the Develop and Library modules, some (only some) of the edits I've made in Develop don't carry over into the Library module. I can watch my photo change (usually clarity and sharpness) as I go between the two modules. But not only that, all of a sudden when I export my photos, the unfinished version that I see in Library is the photo that exports. I have checked "automatically write changes into XMP", and I am not exporting as "Original". I have three shoots I am currently editing, and I NEED Lightroom to export these photos correctly for my clients. Can anyone finally shed some light on this issue for me??

The first photo is in Develop module, and the second photo is the Library and exported photo. You can really see the difference when looking at her eyes.

Jao vdL · Accepted Answer

What is happening is that the Develop and Library modules use different ways to scale your image down to the screen resolution. This very subtly affects sharpness and clarity. This is unavoidable and is caused by the fact that your display is a low-resolution preview of the actual file and that the Develop module cannot render the entire raw image constantly as that would be extremely slow, so if you are zoomed out, it will show you a low-res version of the image. Only when you zoom in to 1:1 will it render the complete resolution of the file. When you go back to Library, Lightroom renders a jpeg preview of the image at a size slightly larger than it needs to display and then scale down to your display. This will always soften your image slightly. To even complicate things further, when you export your image at a reduced size for email or web display, you can (and absolutely should!) apply output sharpening. This will counteract some of the softening inherent in scaling down the image. Your final image will look more like what you see in Develop after that. If you don't add output sharpening it will look like what you see in Library. An alternative is to use a much higher resolution display like a 4K display or a retina screen. Those are so much higher resolution that you won't notice these subtle differences.

Jao vdL · Answer

Hmm, that looks weird to be honest. I would not expect sRGB in the name of a calibration profile and the size of the profile is too small to be a real calibration as that is not enough to have any calibration tables in it. This looks therefore like it is not calibrated and it probably is just a sRGB profile. Generally Macs, including iMacs have a profile called "Color LCD" as their default that should be a bit better than a plain sRGB profile. If the control panel in System preferences->Displays->Color has the option "Color LCD" in it for profile, try that and see if it makes a difference for the changing of contrast. What you need to do after that is to get yourself a calibration puck that actually measures and corrects your display. They are not that expensive but are essential if you want good results from doing digital photography as otherwise you can't trust what you see. There are several brands such as the Spyder Pro's, the ColorMunki, the i1 displays and others. Another alternative if you son't want to spend the $150 or so for a good entry level one is to see if one of your local camera clubs has one that they borrow out to members. You can also rent them from lensrentals.com and such.

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