Today’s Question: How do you select a color space in Lightroom Classic?
Tim’s Quick Answer: In Lightroom Classic you can only select a color profile when sending an image outside of Lightroom Classic, such as when exporting or editing in Photoshop.
More Detail: Today’s question was a follow-up to the question last week about the color space setting in Camera Raw for those editing photos in Photoshop. The equivalent in Lightroom Classic would be to choose a color profile for images being exported or edited in another application such as Photoshop.
In Photoshop you can select a working space profile in the Color Settings dialog, but this isn’t an option in Lightroom Classic. Rather, Lightroom Classic always uses the ProPhoto RGB color space for rendering images in the Develop module. The Adobe RGB and sRGB color spaces are used in other modules, depending on the focus of the task. You can’t change this behavior, as it is internal to Lightroom Classic.
You can, however, select a profile for images being exported from Lightroom Classic. You can choose the color space you want to use for images being sent to Photoshop on the External Editing tab of the Preferences dialog. There you’ll find a Color Space popup under the “Edit in Adobe Photoshop” heading. There is also a Color Space popup available for configuring other external editors under the “Additional External Editor” heading.
When exporting a copy of an image from Lightroom Classic you can also select the color profile you want to convert the image to. For example, sRGB is a good profile to use for images that will be shared digitally, and Adobe RGB is a good profile to use for images that will be printed after export. The Color Space popup in the File Settings section of the Export dialog is where you can select this profile, as long as you have chosen an image format option other than “Original” or “DNG” from the Image Format popup.
