Lightroom not keeping RAW processing settings

brizzol  wrote Ok my workflow ( which will probably seem like a weird way of doing it ) I import raw files into Lightroom, process them and export them as JPEG's, then remove the files from Lightroom.

That answers the question then. The changes that you make to the raw images are not applied to the image file. They are only stored in the catalog. You make the changes and then export the JPEG images. The JPEG images have the changes. Then you remove the raw files from the catalog and all the changes that were made to the raw images are discarded. All you have now are the original raw images as they were as they were downloaded from the camera. Your workflow is not a very good one for working with Lightroom. It's much better to import the raw images, modify the raw images, export copies when they are needed for other purposes. Keep the raw images as your master files and delete the copies after they have been used for whatever they were made for.

There is a way around this if you want to deal with it. You can modify the Lightroom preferences to tell Lightroom to write changes to XMP files. That means that every raw file will then have its own XMP sidecar file that will have the adjustments that were made using Lightroom. And you will have to make sure that those files are saved alongside the raw files. Lightroom will have to load the raw file and the sidecar file in the future in order to pick up the adjustments that were made using Lightroom previously. I have preferred not to use this option, I like depending on the catalog to retain all of the adjustments. But the choice is yours.