Do your Pixel RAW photos look washed out in Lightroom? If you shoot DNG files on a Google Pixel and open them in Adobe Lightroom (Classic or the cloud app), you have probably noticed they come out soft, oddly bright, and drained of color — nothing like the punchy JPEG the Pixel Camera app showed you a second earlier. Affected users have nicknamed it the “vaseline” look. The good news: your files are not broken, and the fix takes about two minutes.
This is not a one-off complaint. It has been reported across multiple Pixel generations — Pixel 3a, 6, 7, 9 and others — as confirmed by multiple threads on Adobe’s own community forums over the past few years, and it resurfaced recently in a well-upvoted thread in r/GooglePixel with dozens of upvotes and comments confirming that the fix below works. So if you paid for a Pixel largely for its camera and shoot RAW for the extra editing headroom, this one is worth two minutes of your time.
Why your Pixel RAW photos look washed out in Lightroom
The cause is simpler than it looks. A RAW/DNG file is the sensor’s unprocessed data — it does not carry any of the heavy in-phone processing the Pixel Camera app bakes into a JPEG. All that contrast, saturation and sharpening you associate with a Pixel photo lives in the JPEG pipeline, not in the RAW.
When Lightroom imports a Pixel DNG, it automatically applies a camera-matching profile — usually labelled something like “Google Pixel” — that tries to approximate the camera’s look. In practice that profile renders flatter, softer and less saturated than Adobe’s own baseline. The RAW itself is fine and actually holds more detail and dynamic range than the JPEG; it is just being displayed with a starting profile that looks dull next to what you remember seeing on your phone. Change that starting profile and the “vaseline” haze disappears.
Part 1: The immediate per-photo fix (Lightroom Classic and cloud)
This works everywhere — Lightroom Classic, Lightroom desktop, and Lightroom mobile:
- Open the Pixel RAW/DNG photo in the Edit (cloud app) or Develop (Classic) view.
- Find the Profile control near the top of the Basic/Edit panel. It will currently show a camera-matching name such as “Google Pixel.”
- Click the grid/thumbnail icon next to it to open the Profile Browser.
- Under the Adobe Raw profile group, select Adobe Color.
- The photo should immediately gain richer color and contrast, much closer to what the Pixel Camera app showed you.
Adobe Color is Adobe’s own well-tuned default rendering rather than a flatter camera-matching approximation, which is why the image snaps back to life the moment you select it. From there you can edit as normal — you are just starting from a better baseline.
Part 2: The permanent fix so it stops happening on every import
Applying that profile to one photo at a time gets old fast. Lightroom Classic (desktop) lets you set it as the default for all newly imported RAW files. Note that this part is Lightroom Classic desktop only — the cloud and mobile apps do not have this preference, so cloud/mobile users should stick with Part 1.
- Open Lightroom Classic > Preferences on Mac, or Edit > Preferences on Windows.
- Go to the Presets tab.
- Find the Raw Defaults section.
- Set the master option to Adobe Default — Adobe’s “Adobe Default” setting applies the Adobe Color profile automatically — so every newly imported Pixel RAW uses it from the start instead of the camera-matching profile.
Adobe occasionally shifts these menu labels between versions, so the exact wording may differ slightly in your build. The core idea holds regardless: there is a Raw Defaults preference that controls the starting profile for imported RAWs, and pointing it at Adobe’s default stops you from having to fix each photo by hand. If you already imported a batch before changing this, just select them all and apply Adobe Color from the Profile Browser in one go.
One honest caveat
Two things worth knowing before you flip the permanent setting. First, the Raw Defaults change applies to every RAW you import, from every camera — not just your Pixel — so if you also shoot with another camera whose camera-matching profile you actually like, you will be overriding that too. Second, Adobe Color is a better, more natural starting point, but it is still not a pixel-for-pixel match to the Pixel Camera app’s JPEG — that heavily processed look is Google’s own recipe, and matching it exactly means dialling in your own contrast, saturation and sharpening on top. That is the point of shooting RAW, though: you get to decide, and now you are deciding from a clean baseline instead of a washed-out one.
