How does Lightroom 6 choose rendering intent when exporting JPEGs?
Asked 11/18/2015
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In Lightroom 6, Soft Proofing lets you preview different output profiles and choose a rendering intent such as Perceptual or Relative. But in the normal Export dialog, I can choose the output color profile (for example sRGB or Adobe RGB) without seeing any rendering intent option.
When Lightroom exports a JPEG, which rendering intent does it actually use? Also, is "Print to JPEG" effectively the same as exporting a JPEG but with extra color-management options, or is it mainly intended for print workflows rather than web images?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
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No answers so I have attempted an answer myself from what Ive learnt on discussions at. https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1083949
It seems there is not currently the option to specify Perceptual or Relative when exporting images. But furthermore perceptual or relative intents are defined within the color model itself and for the standard color models provided by Lightroom of sRGB and AdobeRGB no perceptual rendering is available so even if the option did exist it would always do relative anyway. ProPhoto model is large enough to encode (approximately) all modifications done in Lightroom anyway so rendering intent is irrelevant for this anyway.
The Print to JPEG option does allow the rendering intent to be specified and also allows CMYK based color profiles to be used, and these profiles are much more likely to support perceptual rendering then RGB based color profiles.
Originally by user28237. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user28237
10y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Based on the community discussion, Lightroom 6 does not let you explicitly choose Perceptual vs Relative in the standard Export dialog.
For common RGB export spaces such as sRGB and Adobe RGB, this usually isn’t a practical issue because those profiles don’t provide a separate useful perceptual conversion in the way printer/CMYK workflows do, so Lightroom effectively uses relative-colorimetric behavior there. With ProPhoto RGB, the space is so large that rendering intent is generally not meaningful for normal Lightroom edits.
The place where rendering intent matters more is output to printer-oriented profiles, especially CMYK/device profiles. That’s why Lightroom’s Print module, including Print to JPEG, exposes rendering intent options.
So:
- Standard Export: no user-selectable rendering intent; for sRGB/Adobe RGB this is generally fine.
- Print to JPEG: mainly for print-style output workflows where printer/profile intent settings matter.
- For web use, standard Export to JPEG in sRGB is the sensible choice, not Print to JPEG.
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