You probably shot it with a picture style that is less saturated than Lightroom's default rendition. First image you see is camera's rendition, next image you see is Lightroom's default rendition.

This may be the most frequently asked question of newcomers to Lightroom.

I'm sure somebody will come along shortly with link(s) to more info about it.

I mean, to answer your specific question, exactly: "No, there is no way to keep the Lightroom rendition from replacing the in-camera preview".

But, you *can* customize Lightroom defaults to more closely match your druthers, e.g. choose camera matching profile. Lightroom rendition will still be different, due to in-camera settings and compensations that Lightroom will not be doing. You can expect to need to do some tweaks to all (or the vast majority of) your imported images before they will be suitable, even if you had them perfected in camera.

If you *really* want to match Lightroom's rendition to your camera, there is a way, but most people find they'd prefer to learn how to make their images even better in Lightroom than what their camera can do. Otherwise, what's the point of using Lightroom?

Rob

Perhaps a bit more information would help us better understand the problem.

For a start are we dealing with Raw or Jpeg files?

What version of Lightroom?

After import, take an image into Develop and report the position of the sliders in the Basic Panel. For LR4 they should all be at zero (from Exposure down to Saturation), for LR2 or LR3 all should be at zero apart from Blacks (5), Brightness (+50), and Contrast (+25).

Have a look at the Camera Calibration panel and report on the settings for Process and Profile.

Jeff Albertini wrote:

 

but i'm not necessarily a "newcomer" to lightroom.  I have almost 4000 photos in LR and have never had this problem before...

With all due respect, if these were RAW photos, then this did happen before, every single time, and you just didn't notice it. This is how Lightroom operates, you can't turn it off, but as mentioned, you can make it work more to your liking.

Yes it only does this with RAW (or DNG) images.