Lightroom: Colours Changing After Rendering Previews

Q: Why do the colours change after rendering the preview in Lightroom?

This is one of the most asked question by people new to Lightroom. All RAW photos contain a preview. This preview is generated by the camera, and this is the preview that you can see on the camera’s LCD.

1. As soon at Lightroom opens the RAW file/photo, Lightroom displays the JPEG/preview embedded in the raw file/photo, to make look as very quick and speedy.
2. Lightroom applies its own profile to the RAW file/photo for the matching camera. Lightroom has been doing this with the beta profiles since Lightroom 2 and with the non-beta profiles since Lightroom 2.2. If you don’t like Adobe interpretation’s of your camera, you can modify it with the Adobe Profile Editor.
3. After applying your camera profile, Lightroom applies all of your modifications that you have done in the Develop module and creates a new preview.

Lightroom does not modify the original RAW photo, but:

1. Lightroom will update the preview of the raw photo to reflect the processing in the Develop module such as cropping… if the photo is a DNG
2. Lightroom will update the XMP/sidecar if you have set to automatically update the sidecars or save/update the image with metadata.