Help! LR JPG exports look nothing like photo when viewing in LR!

Poe wrote in post #9376776
I assumed you meant my workflow, but it seems that certain programs suck at color management without a decent monitor profile.

Every program

True... but Lightroom is different from for instance PS.
You might notice a bad profile in LR which works okay in PS...

Well, now that I've got the monitor calibrated and the luminance of my images match up fairly well from what I see on screen in LR and what I see onscreen in the windows photo gallery, my new problem is that the JPG lacks a lot of detail and clarity in the texture of the coat, now that I've made some edits. I'm gonna take a guess that this is due to converting to a compressed file format like JPG? I'll post a comparison when I get home from work later today.

Compare sharpness at 100%. Don't know WPG, but I do know that Windows Picture and Fax viewer used horrid resizing algorithms.

As a matter of fact PS does too. I wish they would incorporate Lanczos already.

René Damkot wrote in post #9378992
Compare sharpness at 100%. Don't know WPG, but I do know that Windows Picture and Fax viewer used horrid resizing algorithms.

Yup. It's the resizing algorithms. I looked at them both at 100% and they look the same. How frustrating!

I also just noticed that when looking at images at anything less than 1:1, lightroom doesn't try to show you edits such as sharpening or noise reduction, which I just figured out last night when I saw that my exports didn't have the same kind of detail. The exports actually showed the noise reduction I was using whereas the preview doesn't render the noise reduction except when you view the image at 1:1. Is there a way to get the smaller previews to render the noise reduction? Unfortunately I don't have a large enough monitor do display an entire photo at 1:1 and have the toolbars visible too.

Sharpening a Raw file is best viewed at 100% -- it is called "input sharpening" and is designed to work on the pixel level, as does noise reduction. The design of apps like LR and Camera Raw take that thinking and didn't apply those things to a "normal" view. I'm not sure why not -- maybe they didn't want to slow down preview rendering. I never worry about it -- I know that they will be applied in my final image, but I understand it is unsettling if you're not used to it.

The good news is that Lightroom 3 changes this behavior. Check out the free trial -- the noise reduction is not active yet, but you can see the sharpening happen.

Yes, it is unsettling because I manipulate those settings on a global basis, and i can't see the whole image when zoomed in 100%. I think this is a weakness in LR, since I mostly edit for display over the internet and I want to see how the image changes as a whole. Dodging, burning and healing are local edits and are more suited to 100% viewing.

Well, you can't fault LR, there is a caution icon and a flagged warning message on the panel whenever you are zoomed out. And to sharpen properly you need to closely inspect the result at 100% in order to watch out for haloes and other artifacts. However, I will agree that Adobe is being more than a little patronizing in forcing you to do so.

As Tony said, LR sharpening is meant to be "capture sharpening", the initial partial sharpening given an image. If you "mostly edit for display over the internet," you are presumably downsizing your images to web-friendly size and that will require a stage of final "output sharpening" after the resize. LR does do output sharpening as part of the export process, but it is blind, lacking any preview, and I am often not entirely satisfied with it and want to add a touch more in another editor. You can of course re-import the small image into LR, sharpen with the Detail panel and export again. At this point you would have no problem with zoom level because the reduced size of the image would mean that it is always at 100%.

It's how it's supposed to work, and IMO it's a good thing™

However, you can have a preview at "fit screen": Render 1:1 previews after applying NR/sharpening, and then it will show in either Library or web module (No output sharpening and not in the develop module)
http://www.getcolorman​aged.com/general/light​roomforweb/