Lightroom Exporting Softness

What am I doing wrong guys, I read the threads on output export, tried to export with sharpening to screen, standard and high, and the images still aren't comparing well to what I see in lightroom. What's missing? Is it simply because I'm working with raw in lightroom and jpg is what is exported?

IMAGE IS A REDIRECT OR MISSING! HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/gif' | Redirected to error image by FLICKR

Are you resizing and exporting at the same time?

Which is which here, and what exactly are you seeing you don't like?

Not resizing, just straight export.

You can't tell Tony? The left is the exported jpg, the right is raw. I feel like the difference is glaringly obvious, and I keep asking myself if I'm over-exaggerating and the answer keeps coming back as no I'm not

I don't see a difference in sharpness. I do see a definite difference in color saturation and contrast (which can give the impression of less sharpness because sharpness is, after all, edge contrast). The differences in saturation + contrast make me wonder what color space the jpg is in and if you are viewing it in a non-color managed application.

viewing it in preview on imac, the 15 is where the edge sharpness is most notable to me

It's quite an extreme difference on my monitor, but not a clue as to what causes this difference. The outputted jpeg should be more or less identical to what it previews.
What happens if you re import those jpegs back into LR?

I think the one on the right looks sharper (15) and the bokeh is cleaner? but what do I know...

TweakMDS wrote in post #13824435
It's quite an extreme difference on my monitor, but not a clue as to what causes this difference. The outputted jpeg should be more or less identical to what it previews.
What happens if you re import those jpegs back into LR?

I'll try it

hmm looks pretty much the same once it's imported back in, though it did lose some contrast. So maybe it's just preview that's rendering it soft?

I opened it in iphoto and the sharpness looks good, but again the contrast was slightly lost. Better than the above shot tho. Thanks guys.

I see the glaring difference in sharpness, the right is definitely sharper. I do not know if you are a windows or mac user, but on my windows system, I've noticed that the program I use to view my exported jpg's does make a difference. I've taken to only viewing my jpg's in a browser window to see what they'll look like on the web. The microsoft image viewers just do not hold up normally and I have noticed that every image viewer will show a jpg differently.

juscuz wrote in post #13824866
I see the glaring difference in sharpness, the right is definitely sharper. I do not know if you are a windows or mac user, but on my windows system, I've noticed that the program I use to view my exported jpg's does make a difference. I've taken to only viewing my jpg's in a browser window to see what they'll look like on the web. The microsoft image viewers just do not hold up normally and I have noticed that every image viewer will show a jpg differently.

That's what I was getting at by importing again and checking it there.

Another thing you can try is taking a look at the color space settings. I know some browsers and image viewers don't take these into account which would explain the difference in the reds for your image.
You could also try a black and white conversion of this image and see if there's any difference when you export that.

juscuz wrote in post #13824866
I've noticed that the program I use to view my exported jpg's does make a difference.

^^^This.
Also: Compare sharpness at 100% view.

If you resize an image, use the output sharpening.