Export settings for client delivery

Export settings are where careful editing quietly goes wrong. The photographs look right on your calibrated monitor, the client opens them on a phone, and the colours are flat or the skin has gone grey. Almost always it is one of four settings.

Colour space: sRGB, and it is not a compromise

Export client-facing files as sRGB with the profile embedded. Not Adobe RGB, not ProPhoto, however much wider they are.

The reason is what happens at the other end. A file in a wide gamut, opened by software that ignores the embedded profile — which includes a good deal of what runs on phones and inside chat apps — is interpreted as sRGB anyway. The numbers are read against the wrong reference and the result is desaturated and slightly wrong in the reds. Your careful grade arrives looking washed out, and the client thinks that is how you edit.

Keep ProPhoto or Adobe RGB in your working files if that is your workflow. Convert on export. This is the single most common cause of "the colours look different on my phone".

Resolution: full size for the deliverable, and a small set alongside

Export the finished set at the full pixel dimensions of the file, with no resizing and no resampling. This is the copy the client keeps and may want to print from in a decade.

Then export a second, small set. It costs one preset and gets used constantly:

• Long edge around 2048px, sRGB, quality 80.
• For a client who posts, this is the set they will actually use, and it stops them uploading a 40 MB file to Instagram and getting it recompressed badly.

Do not sharpen the small set the same way as the full-size one. Output sharpening is resolution-dependent, and settings that look right at full size are crunchy at a quarter of it.

JPEG quality: 90, not 100

Somewhere between 85 and 92 is where JPEG sits for delivery. Quality 100 roughly doubles the file size against 90 for a difference nobody can see outside a pixel-peeping comparison, and it doubles what you store and what your client downloads.

One thing worth knowing: every re-save of a JPEG loses a little more. Export once from your master at the quality you want. Do not export at 90, then open and re-save to fix a crop.

What about HEIC, or WebP?

Both are more efficient than JPEG and neither is right for a deliverable. HEIC is poorly supported outside Apple's ecosystem, and a client on Windows may not be able to open it at all. WebP is excellent for previews inside a browser and is what most galleries use internally, but it is a strange thing to hand someone as their archive copy. JPEG is the format that will still open everywhere in twenty years.

Metadata: keep the copyright, consider the location

Embed your copyright and contact details in the IPTC fields. It survives being copied around and costs nothing.

Think about GPS coordinates, though. If you photographed a wedding at a private home, the delivered files carry the location of that home, and the couple may forward them widely without knowing that. Stripping location while keeping copyright is a sensible default for private clients.

Filenames, which outlive the gallery

The gallery link may be dead in five years; the folder on the client's laptop will not be. A camera-default name is a wasted opportunity and a collision waiting to happen — every camera on earth produces a DSC_0001.jpg.

A pattern that works:

• 2026-07-18_hana-omar_ceremony_042.jpg
• Date first, so it sorts chronologically in any file browser.
• Client or job next, so it survives being mixed with other photographs.
• Section, so a flat folder is still navigable.
• A sequence number, zero-padded so 10 does not sort before 2.

Use lowercase, hyphens rather than spaces, and no punctuation beyond hyphens and underscores. Spaces and ampersands in filenames still cause trouble in URLs and in older software.

A preset to build once

Two export presets, set up properly, cover almost every delivery:

1. Client full size — original dimensions, sRGB, JPEG quality 90, copyright metadata in, GPS out, filename template as above, standard output sharpening for screen.
2. Client web — long edge 2048px, sRGB, JPEG quality 80, same metadata rules, lighter sharpening, _web suffix on the filename.

Then the export decision disappears from every future job, which is the point. What to do with the files afterwards is covered in how to deliver wedding photos to a client.