a6000: Difference in darkness of RAW vs embedded jpeg preview

[Nick P]

I just recently began to notice a discrepancy in shadow brightness in my RAW files and the embedded jpeg preview inside the raw file.  Looking back at some previous pictures I took a year ago I don't notice this same discrepancy.  Its a little disconcerting to me since it means that I don't have a good sense of a picture's exposure until I get it into Lightroom.  In trying to think of what could be causing this, I believe I did update my camera's firmware within the last year (I'm on 3.2 now), but that's the only thing I can think of that may be causing this issue.  Has anyone else experienced this same issue?  See attached image for a comparison between the raw file and the embedded jpeg.

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Edited August 28, 2019 by Nick P
typo

[Pieter]

Is the dynamic range setting of your camera set to DRO Auto? The embedded jpeg will then show enhanced dynamic range. Also check this thread.

[Nick P]

On 8/28/2019 at 2:01 AM, Pieter said:

Is the dynamic range setting of your camera set to DRO Auto? The embedded jpeg will then show enhanced dynamic range. Also check this thread.

I did another experiment with DRO Auto set to off, and while that may have been part of the problem, it seems like there is another aspect to this.  I discovered that there is a difference between the Lightroom rendered preview (what I see in the develop module) and the jpeg that is exported from Lightroom.  Below shows an example of this, the image on the right is what I see while I'm working on a photo in the LR develop module while the image on the left is the same image exported to hard drive.  You can see that the image on the right is darker; there is some detail in the shadows that is not visible in the right image.

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This seems to defeat the point of the develop module in LR, which is to have an accurate representation of what an image will look like after its exported to JPG.  Any ideas?

Edited November 24, 2019 by Nick P