To understand the differences between Canon defaults in DPP and Adobe defaults in LR/ACR (note that I am only talking about factory defaults because it is intrinsic to Raw that most of the default settings can be freely changed although there are some functions that you don't get to play with), we need to start with a history lesson. So don your school uniforms, girls with skirts to one inch below the knee and boys with those smart blazers with the POTN crest.
When Canon started selling digital SLRs it seemed obvious to them that because of the price the buyers would be professionals and advanced amateurs, the sort of people who, even if they shot jpgs, would want to at least tweak it in PS, if not more. So they made their jpg processing fairly light-handed, the kind that would be easy to override. Then after a few years they discovered that with a CMOS sensor they could cut their costs and market a cheaper product and the Drebel, the 300D, created a mini-revolution by being the first DSLR under $1,000. The 300D and the 350D still had that bland jpg processing, but when Nikon responded with their own consumer priced models their market research told them that the costumers would be people who wouldn't spend money on PS and a lot of them wouldn't be interested in editing jpgs even with cheaper software. So they designed their cameras to spit out a finished product, contrasty to the point of black clipping, saturated and sharp. And Canon sales dropped. They responded by going one better - starting with the 30D and the 5D and then the 400D, not only did they jazz up their default processing, they even gave the user a choice of Picture Styles (among them they retained the old traditional Canon style and called it Neutral). Default was Standard P.S. - a preset package that added to the basic camera color profile (a different generic devise-dependent profile for each model) additional separate tone curves for each RGB channel in order to do the "jazzing up" and some automatic middle-of-the-scale settings for the user adjustable camera parameters.
It now became necessary to put these same innovations into DPP. IIRC, from DPP 2.0.
Adobe at the same time was developing ACR. The first plugin was sold as an add-on for PS 7, but when that was replaced by PSCS, ACR was included in the package. And ACR was potted into the new Lightroom. The Adobe designers used the same logic that the Canon designers had used originally - it seemed obvious that they were addressing an audience of people who came to tinker; so like Canon in the early days, they made their defaults moderate, bland and boring. They created a basic profile and then tweaked it for each camera model based on a quick test of a rented, borrowed, or otherwise acquired copy. (We are talking about dozens and eventually many scores of cameras) This practice created a lot of unhappy ACR/LR users. The rendering of reds, oranges and yellows was really more fantasy than reality. The manufacturers were making much better profiles; they not only could devote more time to it, they also had closely guarded insider knowledge about their sensor modules - how they see colors and how they turn the colors to Raw digital data. People started clamoring for "Canon color" and "Nikon color", etc. In 2008 Adobe's Eric Chan directed a long project, first to construct an improved matrix profile, the basis, with LUTS for individual models, of today's Adobe Standard, and then to build for all the major models a series of DNG Camera Profiles that would emulate the makers' Picture Styles. However, they remained true to their original design philosophy by not creating the same sort of preset profile+extras packages that the makers were putting in the cameras. The user can of course add in that extra contrast, saturation and sharpness, but we said at the beginning that we are talking about factory defaults.
From the beginning there were also complaints about the demosaicing engine in ACR. The first one was too noisy and after a while it was switched to a smoother rendering, but then there were complaints that detail was being lost. Finally, after they worked out how to include better NR in the parametric workflow, they went back to a more detailed and noisy conversion in LR3/ACR6. Canon has also quietly done some tweaking of their demosaicer; as it stands today DPP's rendering is a bit more smeary than Adobe's (IMO).
There is one further very noticeable difference between DPP and LR/ACR, to my eyes at least, and that is the way partially clipped highlights are handled. "Partial" meaning one or two but not all three channels are clipped. This situation can cause false colors in the highlights. Suppose we have a color that theoretically should be 280/240/230 but it can't be encoded thus because 255 is the maximum, so it becomes 255/240/230. The red channel is clipped and detail-less, the proper balance between the channels is destroyed and the resultant color is false. DPP takes the position that prevention is better than cure and routinely clips all the highlights slightly, throwing away data that might be problematic and pruning back to a point where there is no falsification of the relations between the channels. Other Raw converters attempt to do recovery of the partially clipped highlights, since LR4/ACR7 Adobe even does some of it automatically, without asking permission.
OK, class is out. No rowdiness in the schoolyard!
It's a simple process to change the Lightroom Default settings...do a quick Google search on "change Lightroom default settings," and you'll be a happy camper. No need to mess with import presets if you have your defaults set up the way you want them.
