sRGB exports darker / workaround

I'm having exactly the same issue on my Surface Studio. It's turning a dark grey area in an image black. Yet when you open the saved jpeg in photoshop it's grey again!

On the phone, in chrome etc black. In Photoshop, grey! Weird. It seems that unless I switch my monitor profile to a basic srgb one then what I see in lightoom and what is exported is different.

What version of LrC?

And if v10, what Profile are you selecting?

And I probably glossed over this, Starting with RAW?

Chrome on Mac is indeed color managed and does support v2 and v4 profiles. What you are seeing here is therefore likely the result of a v4 icc profile as digital dog suggests as Lightroom has problems with those.

I have a similar issue as well. Here is a screen shot. The image on the right is from within Lightroom (I labeled it wrong), but the "export to .jpg and viewed in Chrome" shows it to be darker and muddier. I always thought that chrome was color managed, but apparently not. Still though, it's very annoying to send images off to clients that seem too dark.

I'm on MAC OSX with an external color calibrated external monitor.

Thanks.

This is extremely strange. The soft proofing setting has nothing to do with the export path and in no way is involved with that.

Can you post some screenshots of this problem? What the image looks like in Develop/Library and an export shown in Photoshop.

If you are getting exports that are much darker than the image appears in Lightroom, there are a few things that can happen to cause this. One is possible if you have very large amounts of noise in the images. Think starry sky shots at high ISO or other kinds of night photography. What can happen in those cases is that the display in Develop does not accurately represent the noise in the final output and exports can appear both lighter or darker depending on the export settings (scaling and sharpening basically) and the app that you use to view the image which can use different scaling algorithms to scale the image. Photoshop for example uses two different scaling algorithms based on whether the zoom ratio is a power of two (i.e. 25%, 50%, etc.) or something in between (33%, etc.) which radically changes the appearance of the image if you have a lot of fine detail or noise.

Lastly, lots of strange problems in Lightroom are fixed by resetting its preference file. The preference file gets corrupted much to easily and if it is it causes very strange behavior, so that is something to try.

Yes, if soft proof alters the data themselves, it is user error. Soft proof is a visual, on-screen check for gamut clipping in the proof profile. Anything within gamut is, and should be, unaffected.

This is almost certainly a combination of an incorrect/defective/corrupt monitor profile, and viewing in non-color managed applications that just ignore the profile.

Calibrating and profiling the monitor is indeed the solution, and calling it otherwise just shows a lack of understanding.

What operating system do you use?

And in what application are you viewing the exported jpgs? If it is not color managed, you cannot expect images to display the same as in Lightroom.

the standard "calibrate your monitor" circular non-solutions

If you are concerned about correct colors, you should calibrate with a hardware calibrator, which will create a new, accurate monitor profile. But only color managed applications use the monitor profile, so applications without color management are unaffected.

I did notice that exporting the jpeg while the image is set to "soft proofing" for sRGB exports it correctly. The resulting jpeg looks exactly as it does in Lightroom

Soft proofing has no effect on the exported image, it's only a preview of what the image will look like with a particular profile. It's designed primarily to be used with printer profiles to get an idea of what the image will look like when printed.