Adobe lightroom changes colors after importing pictures

Question

I have a strange problem where colors appear to be inverted when I load in my pictures of the recent bloodmoon into Adobe Lightroom.

Here are two pictures (on imgur) showing the difference between the JPG that my camera produced (along with the raw file), and the picture that lightroom exported after just importing the picture.

I don't understand what is going wrong. The files show up having no problems when I just look at the raw and jpg files in Preview on my macbook. If I only load the JPG into Lightroom, it appears to be working fine, but if I only load the RAW images the colors are all screwed up.

Since I don't have Photoshop, I tried using GIMP instead and loading the raw images works great. This makes me think (or hope!) there is a setting in Lightroom somewhere causing this strange behavior, but the thing is I have used Lightroom for months now without any problems like this.

Any help is greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.

What camera do you have and what version of Lightroom do you have installed? This is important for this question to be answerable. — dpollitt, Sep 29 '15 at 04:11
Canon D700 is not a model and please list the FULL version number for Lightroom! I.e. 5.0.1.2.3 — dpollitt, Sep 29 '15 at 12:16
Possible duplicate of Why does my Lightroom/Photoshop preview change after loading? — mattdm, Sep 30 '19 at 14:12
Have you tasked LR to automatically apply some settings when importing images? It seems to me that LR tried to expose it "correctly" — Olivier, Oct 11 '19 at 20:04

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 29 '15 at 02:16

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It's possible that your RAW images are just being auto-exposed by Lightroom. Images that are mostly blackness can cause the auto-exposure algorithm to do some silly things, since it tries to even out the histogram and most of the luminance values are squashed in a big peak against the left edge of the histogram.

Can you try going to the Develop tab and pressing Reset on the bottom right, or making sure that the sliders in the Basic section are all set to zero?

answered Sep 29 '15 at 02:16

Robotkabob

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Okay, I don't know why I didn't look into the slides in the develop tab, but yes the values were increased for some reason. Pressing reset just sets them back to the values with increased brightness etc. Is there a way to stop Lightroom from doing these changes automatically on import? – Frank Sep 29 '15 at 07:12

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 29 '15 at 19:24

I had the same issue in Lightroom and GIMP, until I noticed that Lightroom is loading just the raw image with a different color calibration where as the camera and GIMP pickup the camera's color calibration. In lightroom I had to set the program to use the camera's color settings instead of the adobe color calibration. When I made this change, I noticed that everything started to look the same.

an explanation of is is at Camera Calibration default setting

From adobe forum

Go to Develop

Select an image of the camera/file format you want to set/reset the default for

Click the reset button for the image

Adjust your settings to what should represent the Default (i.e. a different Camera Profile)

Hold Alt and click "Set Default ...." (the button where "Reset" was)

Click either "Restore Adobe Default Settings" to reset or "Update to Current Settings" to update the Default with what you've chosen for the image

Ah that solved it, thank you very much for the clear instructions! Can't believe it in the end was so "easy" — Frank, Sep 30 '15 at 19:21

Adobe lightroom changes colors after importing pictures

2 Answers2