Shooting in RAW plus Lightroom question

[Shanman]

I recently started to shoot in RAW to try it, and now when I upload in lightroom it darkens all of my pics. Anyone experience this? I have used lightroom with Jpeg and no problem. I have to autotone each pic to make it better. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Ysarex]

It's not a case of LightRoom darkening your photos but rather LightRoom is rendering the raw file with different defaults than the processing software in your camera used to generate a JPEG. Your camera's sensor captures and image and if you save a raw file it saves just what the sensor captured and no more. That raw image must be processed. The software in your camera processes it one way to produce the JPEG. LightRoom processes it a different way to present it to you and then it's your show from there. You can create presets in Lightroom to alter the default way that it first displays your image.

Joe

 

[Big Mike]

Joe is correct.

The camera always 'shoots' in RAW, but when you have it set to jpeg, the camera processes the image using the in-camera settings (scene modes etc) and that's what you get on the memory card.

When you have the camera set to record Raw files, the camera does not process the image, just saves the raw data. When you import into Lightroom, it generates a preview, and it sounds like your default settings are giving you a flat/basic image.

In Lightroom, you can apply similar scene modes to get the images looking more like the camera jpegs. They can be found in the develop module, down in the calibration palette. Or you can just make some adjustments as you see fit.

As with everything in Lightroom, if you have something that you want applied to multiple images, it's very easy with the 'Sync' tool.

 

[sk66]

One trick to LR to make life easy/faster:
Take a "typical image" and process it with "basic settings." Start with the processing mode and profile under the Calibration tab. Also do basic sharpening in the details panel, and basic edits (for contrast, saturation, etc). Don't try to make that one image "perfect," just "fix" the things in the raw so it looks like a descent Jpeg. Once that's done save it as a default so that it's applied to all images automatically upon import.