When viewing a RAW image in an image editing program, that program has to go through a number of transformation steps which affect the appearance of the image, in order to display the image.

Different RAW software packages will have differences in the way they apply these steps.

Since LR4 and CS6 are both by Adobe, I would suggest that it's because one of the two is too old to have a profile tailored to your camera.

This affects:

• Colour space conversion

  Red, green and blue in the Bayer filter are not necessarily the same hue as red, green and blue in the standard sRGB colour space. The camera does colour correction to convert the colours into the desired colour space, which is usually sRGB. If you an equivalent image in a RAW image editor, it will also do colour space conversion, but it may use a different colour matrix for the conversion due to the manufacturer of the RAW editing software not having access to the same colour matrices used in the camera (or the camera having been released later than the RAW editor). If your RAW editing software is correctly configured, this step should not cause any noticeable difference in the resulting picture. Those who know what to look for (for example, Canon or Adobe's signature colour profiles, which try to enhance skin tones and blues) may be able to notice the difference especially when testing.

• Contrast / Gamma correction

  Gamma correction is applied which converts from the linear values to gamma corrected values as required by digital image files. This correction is not a straight gamma correction; a contrast curve is applied to ensure that highlights and blacks curve off nicely. Some cameras store the camera's contrast setting in the RAW file and some RAW editors can use this; otherwise RAW editors will use an in-built contrast curve. This can create quite a noticeable difference between the in-camera JPEG and an equivalent RAW viewed in an image editor, or between multiple different RAW editors. The contrast curve affects not only the appearance of contrast but also, indirectly, the colour saturation. The great thing about working with a RAW file is that you have full control over the contrast curve applied in software, before lossy operations such as sharpening, noise removal or JPEG compression have to take place.