Photos exported from PS are much darker than from LR

[kimkimkim555]

I import into light room and run a filter which works great. Photos look great. Save them and others can see them exactly the same as I do.

Now, if I open them in photoshop and do some editing, then export again, all of a sudden the photos are very dark. I have not messed with brightness at all.

Someone said I may have an invalid icc file or something.  How can I find that file, fix it, and make is so that the photos exported from photoshop match the brightness and look of the LR photos?

Please put it in plain english because I am not an expert.

I have a windows 11 laptop, and I run Adobe Creative Cloud (everything has been updated, because I thought that may be the issue), but I have Photoshop 25.4, Lightroom 7.2

Thank you so much!

[D Fosse]

Please show screenshots.

[kimkimkim555]

[D Fosse]

OK, I assumed we'd be getting some context to go with the screenshots.

You need to give us something to go on. What's the procedure, exactly? What does this mean:

I import into light room and run a filter which works great (..) I open them in photoshop and do some editing, then export again

Take us through it step by step.

[kimkimkim555]

Sorry. I opened the photo in Lightroom, and there is a preset that I use that is built-in to Lightroom. Its called Enhance Portrait. I use that, and adjust as needed. 

Then I exported it. If I send it to someone or look at it on my phone or something, its fine, looks exactly as on the laptop.

Now, here is where the weird part starts.

Open the file in photoshop and cropped it. I didn't do anything else.

Exported it again.

It darkened itself. I didnt mess with any brightness settings at all in photoshop. 

When I am in photoshop the photo looks fantastic

Its only when I look at it on a different device, or send it to someone and they open it that it is dark.  So it seems like what I see on my laptop (where I am doing the edits) is not accurate.  

Its really weird that the photo got dark just from being opened in photoshop.  

Is there some setting that I may have accidentally set to auto adjust the images?

Its not just this one photo, it happens quite a bit. 

I

[D Fosse]

I'm stumped. I can't think of anything that can do this. The colors are unchanged, it's only the brightness.

What other application are you viewing the exported file in? How does the exported file look when you reopen it in Photoshop? Can you try to use Save For Web instead of Export and see if you get the same result?

It could be a bad monitor profile, laptops are notorious for this - but if so this is an extremely non-typical case. That usually manifests itself very differently.

The only other possible thing I can think of is that some laptops have a "helpful" (not) function that adjusts screen brightness based on actual screen content. With the default dark interface in Photoshop and Lightroom, that might cause it to crank up image brightness.

Can you Save out the image (not Export) while you have it open in Photoshop (and looks OK), and attach it here? So at least we can see what it's supposed to look like.