Lightroom 3 Export to JPEG issue ( please help) (photo attached)

Question

Hello,
     I have been going crazy trying to solve this issue and can't find a solution. I am using Lightroom 3.4.1 on a Mac running 10.6.7. In Lightroom I am editing raw images from a Canon 7D. I tweak and adjust the images to my liking but when I export them as a JPEG at full quality using color space sRGB my jpegs do not look like my adjusted photos in Lightroom. The biggest missing factor is all my "detail" adjustments. Sharpening ect. The colors are slightly less vibrant but the huge issue is the sharpening I do that disappears. Can anyone help me with this? I will supply an example below. On the left is the jpeg and on the right is the grab from Lightroom. I am viewing the jpegs in preview and don't have photoshop. Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

When you export from Lightroom and you do not select the resize option, you will get the full resolution from your original image. This contains far more pixels than your screen can display as displays are very low resolution devices (typically only around 100 ppi). When you open the resultant jpeg in an image viewer, it will have to downscale from that. Usually many times. This necessarily introduces blur and the result will strongly depend on the chosen scaling algorithm. Lightroom uses a fairly good one to downscale and it shows you a preview of a properly output sharpened image at the size you are looking at. Preview uses a particularly bad one. In preview if you want the screen pixels to correspond to the image pixels, you need to hit apple-0 (or use the view menu and select "actual size"). In Safari and Firefox, you need to click on the image to zoom in to actual pixels.
Your comment also makes me realize that you do not really understand the sharpening in Lightroom. The detail tools in Develop are meant to optimize what is called capture sharpening. These should NOT be used to optimize sharpness at the fit view level, but only at the 1:1 view level. They operate basically on the image to correct for image blur that comes from the sensor's antialias filter and for a small amount of lens blur (say when you are diffraction limited owing to use of large f-numbers). Do not zoom out and play with the detail setting. Zoom into 1:1 on certain areas and optimize the sharpening. There are many tutorials on the web that explain this. Then when you go to output your image, you need to apply another sharpening, called output sharpening, at the final size, in order to correct for blur introduced by the output medium such as a printer or a display and by rescaling the image. The print panel has this built in. In the export panel, the options are in the lower tabs. You need to rescale the image to your final size (for example, a 533x800 pixel image is typical for a good web sized image). Then also apply the correct output sharpening in the tab below it. Typical would be to sharpen for screen at a standard amount. I showed some comparisons on this around the LR 2 timeframe here: http://lagemaat.blogspot.com/2008/08/on-output-sharpening.html The output sharpening has improved by quite a bit by now from those examples, but they show the general idea.
Hope this helps.
Jao