P: Auto-tone analysis should apply post-crop, scanned photos a problem

Yep that's what I would do, but were hoping (praying?) that eventually using Auto-tone on the original image is going to "nail it" and not require further adjustment. When on a tight schedule to complete a business assignment there’s always a trade-off between taking the time to do the “best” versus “good enough.”

Regardless, it should be relatively easy to put a checkbox option in LR's Preferences for 'Auto-Tone: Use full-image when cropped.’ All it has to do is tell the Auto-tone routine to use the full-image (current) or crop area only. Adobe can make “crop area” the Auto-tone default setting, since that best fits the majority of usage.

In that scenario, I would expect the user to tone one (the master) and sync the cropped virtual copies. In general I'm a big fan of options for new handling instead of altering existing handling, but in this case, I'm still not convinced - perhaps we'll see whether Adobe is or not...

I guess it would be more a matter of workflow preference, rather than what provides the "best" image toning.

Take for example a commercial shoot that has many different product items in an ad display. Suppose you later decide to crop out each of the products separately using virtual copies and want the toning to be as uniform as possible. When touching up one of the cropped virtual copies you decide to start over by hitting Auto-tone, the image will very likely be much different than the original uncropped image.

Without a user preference setting you know for sure there's going to be complaints from some users that, "LR4 auto tone continues to be a disaster" – It's the nature of the beast!

I can't see any reason for an option. Are there *any* circumstances where you would *want* the region cropped out to be considered in the auto-toning? I've been trying very hard, and I still can't imagine any such circumstance...

|> "Surely it is obvious that the Auto-tone should work on the cropped image only".

It's obvious to me too.

If you redo a crop that has toning optimized for a relatively dark area, then you have to re-optimize the toning if you move the crop to a relatively light area (or vice versa) - no way around that whether you use auto-tone to assist, or not. I can't think of a single thing better about including regions outside the crop zone when auto-toning. This falls in the category of glaring omission, in my opinion, and should be rectified.

If you redo a crop that has toning optimized for a relatively dark area, then you'll have to re-optimize the toning if you move the crop to a relatively light area (or vice versa) - no way around that whether you use auto-tone to assist, or not. I can't think of a single thing better about including regions outside the crop zone when auto-toning. This falls in the category of glaring omission, in my opinion, and should be rectified.

Think about what you just said and get back to me, Rob. Really?

Same thing that happens if you manually tone it optimally for different cropped regions - come on Rikk.

From a purely "technical implementation" viewpoint, providing an Auto-tone option to use the whole image area OR just the cropped area seems like a necessity.

No matter how well you design the Auto-tone algorithm the results are always going to be better if it's only sampling the picture area you want in the final image.

The potential downside is if you change or remove the crop the image probably won't be optimally Auto-toned, which will require you to start all over. This is especially true with PV2012's image adaptive Tone controls. As long as this is implemented as a "user selectable option" I don't see any issue.