Lightroom Automatic Tweaks on first image view?

Hey guys,
kinda new to Lightroom

I'm really enjoying its capabilities, but I'm noticing that when viewing a photo for the first time in Lightroom it looks "plain" until finished loading, and then Lightroom applies some minor tweaks. usually they're pleasing, but I'm curious as to whether this can be turned off.

I think I've tracked this to the Camera Calibration and the ACR 3.6 setting, but there doesn't seem to be a way to turn it off. apparently it reads the camera profile from the meta data and applies the respective profile right off the bat. not sure this is a bad thing, necessarily, is it? though sometimes I would like to be able to turn it off, just to see.

duh, I think this may be as simple as the switch on the left of the Camera Calibration panel in Develop?

Ah...that might have been what I have been looking for too. When I loads pics they look great for 1 sec, then go to default, it was getting annoying.

You're talking about RAW images, correct?

What you're seeing is the embedded preview image built into the RAW... its basically what the in-camera .jpeg would have looked like using your camera's settings.

-You see that preview change when LR finishes building its own preview image based on its internal ACR profile for your camera.


RAW doesn't use the internal camera settings (especially any RAW converter other than Canon's.) So it is VERY likely that the default ACR result will not be pleasing. People sometimes describe the images as looking "flat", and undersaturated. Often people will create a "develop preset" that gives them a good starting point for editing their images.

Anyone care to share their presets?

thanks David, yeah, that's a great idea, but how to go about "getting back" the original settings to use as a preview. that's what I'm trying to figure out.

it turns out that turning off the ACR has no effect, either.

the auto tweaks seem to be making some color and contrast adjustments -- the camera profile (ACR 3.6 by default in this case) only has controls for Shadows tint, and primary colors hue & saturation adjustments.

msgvb wrote in post #3922156
thanks David, yeah, that's a great idea, but how to go about "getting back" the original settings to use as a preview. that's what I'm trying to figure out.

it turns out that turning off the ACR has no effect, either.

the auto tweaks seem to be making some color and contrast adjustments -- the camera profile (ACR 3.6 by default in this case) only has controls for Shadows tint, and primary colors hue & saturation adjustments.

You can't...

even if you could, you couldn't work with that preview image for outputting to .jpg... its just the embedded preview... not the actual image data.

There is a free program out there that will let you extract that embedded preview image from the RAW... so you could at least view it in Windows explorer if you desired, but its not a HQ preview image, so its not useful for much.

This confuses alot of people... perhaps Adobe should not show ANY preview in LR until it builds its own.