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

What happens if you want to crop differently later-after autotoning and tweaking to your satisfaction? You have to reapply Autotone? All your develop settings??? Start over?

It's not just scanned photos that are problematic. One of the most common reasons to crop is due to an over-bright or over-dark region that would be best to exclude, whether due to scanning process, or in the course of normal photography.

Along these lines, image adaptive behavior of sliders is also governed by whole image. It would be better if it could be "adapted" to the cropped region as well.

Thanks. The black borders on my scans really throw it out. My current workflow is either to crop the original in photoshop or just not use auto-tone.

Pity 😞

Peter, yes it is effectively useless given Auto-tone's behaviour in 4.0, 4.1RC1, 4.2RC2 for photos with white borders. However 4.1 has just been released and preliminary analysis shows that it has been addressed for photos with bright whites in it. I will try over the weekend but I am hoping this means positive things for scanned photos with borders.

A quick test shows it is not applied post-crop (I really only reported this a couple of days after Adobe finalized the 4.1 release) but I hope the recent changes will make it less of an issue. I am not entirely confident as there are big differences between small bright white areas and white borders.

The positive thing is I have ignored auto-tone in prior versions of Lightroom but with its new management of highlights I want it to work automatically for all my photos and now be part of my workflow, hence me raising it. We will see 🙂

This is a really important topic. I have to import hundreds of transparency and film scans. The scanner software does have an auto crop but it is not 100% reliable so I do the crop in Lightroom.

This means that Auto-tone is effectively useless. Exporting and reimporting or cropping in Photoshop are both a significant overhead to the workflow.

Surely it is obvious that the Auto-tone should work on the cropped image only or provide an option with associated shortcut.

Not entirely satisfactory workaround but if you are eliminating the white border by cropping each shot export the cropped version and reimport then use auto tone.

When I use a scanner, as opposed to a RAW camera shot, I use a family of pre-sets for scanning to optimise the original capture.

The scans Assumed to be TIFF or JPEG have the data baked-in which means autotone has to work with less data than a RAW image. A RAW file would lose the data in the export/re-import - unless using DNG.

Same problem with photos assembled as panoramas under Photoshop then reimported in LR : the "white" borders wich inevitably surround the panorama (if not cropped out in PS) appear to be taken into account by the auto-tone function.