Colour problems - suggestions appreciated

[Alexr25]

You don't have to do anything or load anything into lightroom.
Lightroom uses its own propriety color space to work on image files. This color space is not visable to anything outside of lightroom.
When an image is imported into lightroom it automatically gets converted from its original color space into lightroom's color space. When Lightroom sends a image to the display it automatically converts the image from lightroom's color space to the displays color space as defined by the display ICC profile. Similarly when lightroom sends an image to the printer it automatically converts it from the lightroom color space to the printer's color space. When you export an image as a jpeg you have to tell lightroom what color space to use.
The fact that the photos that you export images look dull indicates that your exported images have been converted to the wrong color space. As I said before make sure that you really are exporting your images as sRGB!

 

[weepete]

Haave you tried soft proofing to see if there is a difference?

 

[Alexr25]

On further reflection I think that you problem is with how your applications handle monitor profiles.
I don't use picassa so can't help there but I do know that there is a problem with Windows photo viewer.
The problem is that it's an old program that Microsoft has never bothered to update and while it is ICC color profile aware it can only read monitor profiles that are written in ICC version 2 format. Most monitor profiling devices including colormonki default to output profiles in the more modern ICC version 4 format. The fix is to re-calibrate your monitor but tell colormunki to use ICC version 2.

 

[jaomul]

Just a follow up in case it helps anyone going fwd-

Picassa has an option to turn on colour management. This solved the problem for viewing photos on my computer. On my last windows 7 computer the colour management was not turned on. this did not seem to matter, it all worked correctly.

Photos still looked washed out on the net, I had used chrome as my previous browser but it didn't seem to gel with windows 8. I used IE9 with new computer. After much reading it seems IE9 is "half colour managed?". I installed firefox as a browser and it solved my online viewing colour problem, it seems firefox is colour managed. Thanks to all who gave input

 

[Alexr25]

Glad you got your problems sorted.
You and others may be interested in this article which gives a brief outline of principals and the state of play of colour management in the popular web browsers.