Lightroom darkens my pics

Joined: 23 Oct 2005 Posts: 23 Location: Seattle, USA

I have noticed this problem upon importing photos into lightroom. It brings them in and then proceeds to darken every one of them. These 2 pics were processed from NEF stright into jpegs. No touchups were made. The first one came from capture nx and the second from lightroom. You can see how much darker the lightroom pic is. Any ideas why it's doing this or how to fix it?

Thanks for any help.

Joined: 04 Jun 2006 Posts: 114 Location: Knoxville, TN

Lightroom does not honor any camera presets...for example, if you have the camera set to increase contrast, boost color, sharpen, etc., it will not render these effects...Capture on the other hand does honor those changes (and can do it exactly the same way as the camera because it uses the same software as the camera).
You can create serial number specific rendering presets for Lightroom (in preferences I think) that it will automatically apply to each image that comes from a specific camera. (handy if you have more than one camera)
Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Michael

Joined: 23 Oct 2005 Posts: 23 Location: Seattle, USA

I'll give that a try. I'm not sure that would make a difference with a raw file as there is no in camera processing going on to the file. Is this a correct assumption or does the camera do at least a little something to the raw file before I get it?

Joined: 04 Jun 2006 Posts: 114 Location: Knoxville, TN

Yes and no...The raw file is indeed free from all camera based processing...but the current camera settings are recorded in the raw file as well. Capture uses those settings as a baseline for rendering the image...Lightroom uses a universal baseline.
So basically when Capture opens the image and renders a preview, it renders it based on the camera settings, if you don't change anything, you will be getting an output identical to the camera. If you navagate the menus in capture, you will see the same options as the menus on the camera.
On the other hand when Lightroom opens the image it uses a standard set of settings for all raw files. It has different tools and settings and uses a different rendering engine, meaning that an image processed in Lightroom will be inherantly different than an image processed in Capture.

Michael

Joined: 23 Oct 2005 Posts: 23 Location: Seattle, USA

I think I have a better understanding now. It appears that adobe cannot render the NEF's as accurately as Nikon's own software. As well as any camera's raw files. That info isn't released by the companies so lighroom has to "guess" at the best way to render the files.