RAW question

I am pure enthusiast, but have been shooting RAW and using Lightroom for over a year. So I'm not a pure newbie by any means.

I realize that the preview of a RAW image in the camera might not look exactly as it does on the computer. But last weekend I took pictures at my son's basketball games. The lighting was far from ideal, which is not uncommon for a Middle School basketball game.

I was shooting manual, and the meter and histogram showed that I was a tad underexposed, but considering I had already slowed down to 1/400 with an ISO of 2500 (f/2. I couldn't slow it down much more.

Even though I was a bit underexposed (the meter normally showed 1/3 to 2/3 under - so not terrible), I thought the color looked pretty good in general. But when I got home and downloaded the, the pictures look extremely drab in most cases - nothing like the colors I'm seeing on my camera. Many of them look very washed out. So I'm trying to figure out if I accidentally applied a pre-set or something without realizing it, which resulted in colors being imported differently. Again, I've been shooting RAW and using LR for over a year and have never noticed such a distinct difference between the color between the two before.

Any ideas what I could check to be sure I didn't do something like that? I know it's hard for anyone to tell what I might have done. But the pictures are just soooo different in LR than they were on my camera, that I'm wondering (hoping!) if I did something accidentally that I haven't done before.

I can post an example later, but that's obviously not going to show what the pictures look like on my camera in comparison.

If anyone has any bright ideas, I'm all years!

Thank you!

I've done sports and the type of lighting seems to vary depending on how old a building you're in. I don't know if that's what affected your photos; I shoot mostly film so am not sure what may have caused what you experienced. If you don't get a response here, you might post in the Sports/Action part of the forum even though that's typically more for display or critique etc. But you could ask Rob or Les and see if they have any ideas.

icepics wrote: I've done sports and the type of lighting seems to vary depending on how old a building you're in. I don't know if that's what affected your photos; I shoot mostly film so am not sure what may have caused what you experienced. If you don't get a response here, you might post in the Sports/Action part of the forum even though that's typically more for display or critique etc. But you could ask Rob or Les and see if they have any ideas.

Thanks for the response. I struggle with whether this is more of a question regarding taking the pictures or a software question.

Considering the colors looked good on my camera LCD, but not on my computer after I downloaded them - I went the software route on my question. Although I certainly could have guessed wrong.

I suppose I could try to take a pic of my camera next to my monitor with my phone to show the difference, but I'm not confident that would turn out very well...

How about older shots on the monitor? Could the monitor have just kicked out of calibration?

no help Kelly

Got nothing to do with sports or action or whatever.

Most likely your camera slipped into another mode (landscape mode or something) and when you brought it into your RAW editor, the editor reverted it back to it's preset.

Try opening it with the Canon software that came with your camera. This software can read the RAW data and display it exactly the same as it was on the camera. Programs like Lightroom can only do a "best guess". Also if you open it with the Canon program you should be able to see what preset it was shot with.

I agree with Stealthy. It sounds like processing setting differences between the camera and the Lightroom default. Possibly settings on your camera or in LR have been changed, or some shooting situations just might exaggerate differences you hadn't noticed before. Either way the differences are not permanent. You can adjust the LR processing parameters to match what you liked about the in-camera sample, or use the Canon raw processor to duplicate the in-camera processing.

Despite shooting in RAW, the display on your camera has been converted to JPEG using basically automatic settings including WB. What you see on the camera is basically what you would see if you shot JPEG or RAW+JPEG.
Try that and see if you see a difference.

I installed the Canon software, and there is definitely a difference when opening it with Canon and LR side-by-side. Now I just have to figure out what is different (and why). So far, nothing has jumped out at me when looking through settings.

Thanks everyone for the input!

Didn't know if you knew. If you are in develop mode in LR you can press the alt key (mac, not sure on PC) the "Reset" button will turn to "Set Default..." so you can try and get LR to match what you saw on the LCD before.

I'm posting back to this topic, as much as I don't want to be.

First time around, I never figured anything out specifically. I just edited in LR and lived with it. Yesterday I shot another of my son's basketball games (with my brand new 70-200!!!), and when I'm looking at the pictures this morning notice the same as noted above.

What I am seeing in LR is significantly different than on the camera LCD or in the Canon software.

Taking a picture of a monitor obviously doesn't work the greatest, but this shows how significantly different they are. The picture actually make the LR picture (left) look darker than it actually is, and the DPP (right) brighter than it is on my monitor, but you get the idea.

Looking through the settings in DPP, I see that it was taken in standard picture style. I looked under the Camera Calibration in LR and found that it was displaying as Adobe Standard. I changed that to Camera Standard, which did brighten it up just a tad.

In my import settings in LR, I have the develop settings set to "none" so I'm not applying anything there.

For the time being, I'm just going to tweak in LR again to try to get them where I want them. But it's frustrating to be relatively happy with what I'm seeing on the LCD at the time of capture, only to be disappointed with what I'm seeing on my monitor.

Having said that, I don't have a high dollar monitor or a calibration tool. I do use a calibration program that is just "by eye". So I know my colors are far from perfect on the screen. But the fact that they are so different between LR and the Canon app on the same monitor still tells me that LR is "off" somewhere.

I've been using LR with my basketball pics for well over a year, but have not noticed this until recently. So that tells me I probably changed something in either LR or my camera that has impacted this, and just can't figure out what that might be.

So any other ideas regarding what that may be is greatly appreciated.

I have not tried your last note Stealthy - so I may try that before next week's games. I do have a PC, but I assume that's the "Set Default Settings" under the Develop menu?

Thanks everyone!

The gap between the Canon PictureStyles Faithful / Neutral and Standard is a good sized gap. If your old sports shots still have their EXIF in place, then DPP should show you if those happened to have been taken in Faithful or Neutral. I never use Faithful or Neutral, but my editor is DPP, not LR.

Kelly

Have you checked lightroom to make sure it's not adding a default preset like autotone when it imports?

I've never used DPP, but this comparison makes me wonder if DPP does some automatic level adjustments based on the histogram or even on what the light meter is reading at the time of the exposure.

I would suggest flipping through the Camera Profiles in the develop module to see if any of them are close to what you want.

Did you really take a photo of your computer screen?

shelland wrote: In my import settings in LR, I have the develop settings set to "none" so I'm not applying anything there.

I use ACR, so I am not completely familiar with LR, but I would assume that "none" is not the same as default or standard processing, but rather the least amount of processing possible that can still show you a photo. A characteristic curve typically needs to be applied to raw photos. These examples look pretty much like what I would expect when comparing a file without a curve applied to one that does.

EDIT: The dark pic has a "flat" curve, and the bright pic has a more typical S curve.

Perhaps you're just unintentionally boosted the brightness on the camera LCD.