I use a mac ios and shoot raw in a cannon 5d mark ii and shortly upon import of my images lightroom darkens and changes my images. This has happened before but not every time. The strange part is my last shoot had the same camera setting but this did not

Question

I use a mac ios and shoot raw in a cannon 5d mark ii and shortly upon import of my images lightroom darkens and changes my images. This has happened before but not every time. The strange part is my last shoot had the same camera setting but this did not happen. The images i have now i can not use after lightroom has automatically altered them even if i try editing back to how they looked upon import

Answer 1

First thing to do is to change the default camera profile applied in Lightroom to camera standard (assuming that you shoot Canon or Nikon). Also make sure that your camera is NOT set up to use any of the HDR modes. Nikon calls those Active Dynamic Lighting. On Canons you often see things like highlight priority mode or "Auto Lighting Optimizer". Make sure that the picture style is set to standard and that for newer Canons the HDR mode is turned off. Most of the HDR modes simply underexpose the image and then add an instruction in the raw file to compensate for this to prevent highlights from being blown out. This causes more noise in the shadows and if you know what you are doing there is no point to this as you should simply expose correctly and get the highest quality raw.
Lastly, make sure that in Lightroom you have not checked "Apply Auto Tone Adjustments" in Preferences->Presets. This should make the default rendering of the raw files the same as the in-camera jpeg (what the camera shows on the back even if you shoot raw) but still give you all the latitude of raw files.