I have recently been playing around with Lightroom and I'm new to creating a raw workflow. Anyway, my question is; why does lightroom automatically develop my RAW images but leaves JPEGs the way they are? Does this have anything to do with the RAW conversion process? When I first select the image on the film strip after import from the disk it appears normally on the screen, but then a little bar on the bottom says "loading...." and then all of a sudden the brightness and color saturation etc. are different before I even touch the develop module. Again, this only happens with RAW files. Any explanations would be appreciated.
Go to Edit > Preferences > Presets and make sure the "Apply Auto tone adjustments" box is not checked.
Do you have Photoshop installed? If you do, start up Bridge and go to Edit > Camera Raw Preferences and make usre the "Apply auto tone adjustments" is unchecked there too.
The Raw file must be developed because it is a Raw file. The Jpeg is already "developed", although you can make additional changes if you wish.
The reason that the Raw image changes is that it initially shows a low-rez Jpeg embedded in the Raw file. Then, the thumbnail is re-created using whatever raw development defaults you have chosen previously. If you have Auto tone adjustments on, it will do a sort of auto-levels adjustment, which will make bracketed exposures look somewhat the same. With Auto tone adjustments off, it will still "develop" the raw file but using whatever you have established as your default settings without doing the "auto-levels".
Even with Auto tone adjustments off, you may still see differences between the embedded Jpeg (or the additional Jpeg if you shot Raw+Jpeg) and the LR-developed raw file. This is due to differences between the way that your camera maker developed the file in-camera and the way Adobe is doing it in Lightroom. By playing around with your defaults in LR, you can probably get close but you may never get them to match perfectly since you are trying to synchronize the processes of two completely different companies.
MichaelKirk wrote:
Where do I find the Lightroom Default RAW import settings? (Obvious newbie to Lightroom here) and have my custom settings apply to my RAW imports?
Michael
LR has had some changes in this functionality with recent versions but I think both of the above links are valid for the latest version and I believe that is what you have.
