I'm not sure I have an issue but I'm just trying to understand what Lightroom is doing to my images once I import them.

I did a fashion shoot yesterday where I wanted to tone down the contrast and saturation of the images in the camera so that when I import them into Lightroom they look the way I intended.

I shot with a 1DS Mark II and I shot in RAW mode only. ( I did not shoot RAW+JPG, just RAW )

As the images were loading into Lightroom they seemed to have the adjustments that I had made in camera ( toned down sat and contrast ) but when I would click on an image it would render the preview with more saturation and contrast, sorta of like it was reading a JPG version or something. This is the part I don't understand what Lightroom is doing. Why didn't it keep the original colors that it imported with?

I guess this leads me to my next question. If you shoot just RAW, does the camera still create a JPG preview that Lightroom picks up and uses it for the previews or does Lightroom grab the RAW file from the camera and when it see's that there is no JPG attached to is does it create one on it's own?

Thanks for all your help in advance.

All Canon RAW files have an embedded small JPEG file. During the import, LR will display the embedded JPEG (for speed), so you actually see the result of the camera settings since the camera generated the JPEG.

Once this is done, LR then generates it's own thumbnails from the RAW data. This takes some time. LR will NOT read the camera settings, and so when you click on it, the preview will render the RAW file with LR defaults. That's the difference you're seeing.

But this isn't too much of a problem since you can easily set the contrast and saturation on one of the photos and then "sync" it with the rest of the photos in LR.

The camera settings for color and sharpness are worthless when shooting in RAW and importing into any application other than Canon's own applications.

Thank you for the explanation, that makes perfect sense.