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Exporting Images to Print and Facebook / Website

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Joined
Sep 24, 2015
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Location
Sydney, Australia
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
10.2
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.13 High Sierra
I'm curious to know the ideal settings when exporting images from Lightroom. When exporting to print, I set quality at 100 and resolution at 300ppi. When exporting to Facebook or uploading to my website, I resize to fit long edge 2048 px. and output sharpen to screen. I would appreciate advice as if these settings are appropriate for my purposes.
 
I think those FB settings are fine - in any case, FB will "optimise" (their word) the files. So you're giving yourself the best chance of avoiding "garbage in, garbage out".

For printing, I assume you are exporting files for output by a third party printer? In that case, export at the exact size they'll be printed and factor in the output sharpening. Also, read their small print.
 
I'm curious to know the ideal settings when exporting images from Lightroom. When exporting to print, I set quality at 100 and resolution at 300ppi. When exporting to Facebook or uploading to my website, I resize to fit long edge 2048 px. and output sharpen to screen. I would appreciate advice as if these settings are appropriate for my purposes.
They are fine, but Quality 100 makes them unnecessarily large. Facebook will probably change this, but for your website this means they’ll load slower. You should not see any quality difference if you use 80.
 
I think those FB settings are fine - in any case, FB will "optimise" (their word) the files. So you're giving yourself the best chance of avoiding "garbage in, garbage out".

For printing, I assume you are exporting files for output by a third party printer? In that case, export at the exact size they'll be printed and factor in the output sharpening. Also, read their small print.
Thank you!
 
They are fine, but Quality 100 makes them unnecessarily large. Facebook will probably change this, but for your website this means they’ll load slower. You should not see any quality difference if you use 80.
Thank you. However, I assumed the quality and resolution settings only had an effect when printing? I appreciate your advice!
 
When exporting to print, I set quality at 100 and resolution at 300ppi
Resolution is only used if you are resizing to physical 'Dimensions' line inches or cm. It's ignored when using pixels.
When exporting to Facebook or uploading to my website, I resize to fit long edge 2048 px. and output sharpen to screen.
I was surprised by the lack of information Facebook provides for photo imports. There are a lot of opinions on the best format for files. Here's one. I'd suggested some Googling.
 
Thank you. However, I assumed the quality and resolution settings only had an effect when printing? I appreciate your advice!
Resolution is indeed irrelevant for the web, but as you‘ll have to use something, it can be anything you want. JPEG quality is definitely not something that is only important for printing. It always is important, but you can also use ‘too high’ quality, which will only increase the file size and so the download time when used for web images. Read this: Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings
 
Resolution is indeed irrelevant for the web, but as you‘ll have to use something, it can be anything you want. JPEG quality is definitely not something that is only important for printing. It always is important, but you can also use ‘too high’ quality, which will only increase the file size and so the download time when used for web images. Read this: Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings

To add to Johan’s comments, The Quality setting is a indicator of the amount of Lossy compression applied to the JPEG file. There are 12 levels of Compression that correspond to the compression settings in Photoshop. Even though Lightroom provides numbers from 1 -100, there are still only 12 compression quality settings. Any number greater the 95 will result in the least level of compression. For web purposed a compression lever of around 65 produces an acceptable quality/size ratio for web use.
Jeffrey freedom had a post that explains this

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality

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