Jeff, fundamentally, Lightroom cannot read the settings you apply in the camera. They are meant for Nikon software and since the raw interpreter in Lightroom is different, there are no settings that map 1:1 with the in-camera settings so Lightroom like almost any raw converter not made by the camera maker ignores them. There are some scripts around that can read the settings from a raw file and apply those to mimic the in-camera jpeg rendering if you search this forum but as I explain below that might not be what you want to do. The reason you are seeing this behavior is that you first see the camera rendered jpeg (every raw has one embedded) and then you see the actual raw file as rendered by Lightroom. By default this rendering is quite bland and you need to do a little editing. Other software (including camera maker's software such as View NX) often simply shows you just the embedded jpeg. It is important to realize that most of the camera settings have no consequence for the data in your raw file, so getting it right in camera as evidenced by what it looks like on the cameras screen is not what you want to be doing as you might actually hurt the hidden quality of the raw file. The camera does not show you the raw data, it shows you a jpeg rendering. The only settings that influence the actual data are exposure settings. The rest is just metadata that gets saved along with the raw data and that gets used to render the embedded jpeg file. The problem with your workflow is that it is not a raw shooting workflow, but a jpeg shooting workflow. If you optimize in camera for how it looks on the screen in the back you are not necessarily producing the best quality raw file. You are producing the best jpeg as even your camera just shows you the embedded jpeg file. These are not necessarily the same thing. Basically if you follow the Ansel Adams philosophy, you are skipping the "negative" step and going straight to the print in your camera. This can be good if you don't want to fiddle afterwards but it defeats the purpose of shooting raw. Also, the interface for optimizing the jpeg in your camera is very cumbersome in general and you are losing a lot of control over the end product. If you want to get the best image and you want to use raw rendering software, you are better off with a different approach that optimizes the quality of your raw capture. For this, set your camera up completely default. Use the camera standard setting in your camera and turn off any dynamic lighting mode. In Lightroom set the camera standard profile as the default profile for raw files from your camera. This will make the initial rendering close to identical to what you see on the camera's screen so you don't get these color shifts. Then shoot the image in your camera so that you don't blow out important highlights (use the blinkies or your histogram) and focus on your composition and not on what the color looks like on your camera per se. Then treat your raw file as the negative from earlier days. To use Adams' analogy, the negative is the score to the performance, the performance being what you do in Lightroom - generating the actual final look of your image. This will allow you to be much more efficient in the field, generate higher quality raw files and spend less time overall as you are not tweaking your camera's settings constantly using its very awkward interface but you are using a far more efficient and powerful method to generate the final image. This advice is independent on whether you use Lightroom or any other third-party raw software. Focus on getting the highest quality capture which is ONLY determined by exposure settings in the field and might actually look under or overexposed on your camera's screen and often can look bland there too but visualize what the final result can be when you get it in your raw converter and start editing.
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