I love editing in lightroom but there's two things that annoy the crud out of me with it. One can't be fixed, the uncatalogued system, I hate it! After that, there's the "auto editing" it seems to do!
To demonstrate my predicament I made this animation:
EDIT:SORRY ITS BIG! I didn't realize that just linking to a gif inserted it >.<
http://i38./wtt9w8.gif
I noticed that as well. I think it's because for whatever reason, when photos are imported the brightness is set to 50 and the contract is set to 25. When I started using lightroom, I noticed that I had to continually adjust my exposure much lower that I thought I should have had to, like I had overexposed the photos; that's when I noticed the brightness slider set way to high. There's no real way to "disable" it; all I did was set brightness and contrast to "0" and then saved that as a preset. You can then apply that preset when importing new photos to "automatically" undo the "auto" settings. I rarely need to use brightness or saturation with the exposure, fill light, and blacks sliders immediately above.
Actually, it's because when the photo is initially imported, you're seeing the jpeg that's embedded in the raw file (the preview jpeg that's shown on the back of the camera) and after Loading, you're seeing LRs interpretation of the raw.
You can change the default settings that LR uses by setting a raw file the way you want it in develop mode and then choosing Develop --> Set Default Settings... from the menus.
LRs Brightness and Contrast settings are just numbers. Normal is not 0 and 0. Normal is 50 and 25 but if you want something else just change it and Set Default Settings.
Also keep in mind that initial view of the embedded jpeg is based on any in camera settings you have selected. While the settings for this proprietary information are embedded in the RAW file, LR cant access or use them like the manufacturer's software can.
There are quite a few LR Develop presets available that mimic these camera manufacturer settings. Also you can download the free DNG profile editor and create your own Camera Calibration default setting. You just need to shoot an image of a color chart, convert it to DNG and run the program on that image. Then you can import the resulting file into LR and set is as default for every RAW (does not have to be DNG) file from that camera as it can be set to be serial number specific in case you wanted to calibrate multiple cameras.
I posted the results of my first try with the DNG profile editor here:
