"...it's just strange that I havent noticed this before, maybe I wasn't paying enough attention to it!" Maybe you have changed your camera settings; for instance turned on Auto Light Optimization or Highlight Tone Priority. Maybe you set a different Picture Style, switched it from the flatter ones like Neutral or Faithful to a "jazzier" P.S. like Standard or Landscape. Or changed the custom parameters of a P.S., sharpening, contrast, saturation and hue. These image characteristics are all products of the processing the camera does in order to make jpgs and they are not inherent in the Raw data. Lightroom does not do them by default nor does it automatically read metadata notations and try to recreate camera processing. It does its own Adobe processing and Adobe's opinion about what makes for a good default starting point for Raw editing and the camera maker's (Canon, in this case) opinion about what makes for a good looking and camera-selling jpg are likely to be quite different. Nevertheless, as Jim has indicated, you can change LR's defaults to accord more with your own desired starting point. Change the default camera profile from Adobe Standard to one of the reverse-engineered imitations of Canon's profiles, for a start. Just remember that Adobe processing is not Canon processing and they never can be entirely identical. Personally, I like what I can do with Adobe tools; if I wanted to recreate Canon processing, I would use the software provided with the camera.
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