So here's the scoop. I shoot in RAW on a Canon 40D on Adobe 1998. My Photoshop color setting is at North American Prepress 2 (with Adobe 1998 as my RGB working space).
Even with all this, when I try to convert my RAW shots through ACR (Adobe Camera RAW), they start off vibrant with great contrast, and then some sort of auto...something occurs. I have a video of this:
As you'll see, it starts off great. Then the colors sort of desaturate and the contrast goes haywire. I can't really seem to find a fix. This doesn't happen when I shoot in JPG. Shooting in RAW lately seems like I'm doing more post-processing work than is needed.
All it's doing is applying the ACR presets to the thumbnails. Change your preset preferences and it won't do this any longer. I have just the opposite. When first looking at mine they are flat but then perk up.
Those are your preferences - not your presets. To create a new preset you need to use the fly-out menu on the right of the ACR screen. You can save a preset as a new Camera Raw default, which will impact all new images, or you can save a named preset, which you can apply manually later either within Camera Raw or by using the "Develop" command in Bridge.
This has nothing to do with your issue (which isn't really an issue at all -- it's just the way ACR works), but you may want to save your settings in xmp files rather than the central database. That way if you ever move your files to another drive you won't lose all the settings.
What you're seeing is the jpeg preview in the raw file when you initially import. Then ACR applies its settings to the raw data.
If you want ACR to look like the jpegs, you need to go to labs.adobe.com and download the beta profiles for ACR and download the latest (4.6) ACR. That will get you the closest.
Or use DPP to process the raw files and they'll look exactly like the jpegs.
And it doesn't matter what color space your camera is set. Color space gets applied when you convert the raw data.
You're right that shooting raw needs more work than jpegs.
