Auto tone tool - customisable ?

[Muddyboy]

I find the auto tone tool very useful. However, I’d like to be able to edit what it does. What I would like is that, when I click it, it doesn't add contrast, vibrance or saturation. I’m finding that it typically adds 6 contrast, 20 vibrance and 5 saturation. I'm working through a wedding I shot last week and finding the auto tool is very helpful but every time, I'm having to click three more times to reset these three values. Adjusting the tone is very effective, but I don't like these other three adjustments. I also tend to add a bit of dehaze, even in interior shots. So, can I poke around under the bonnet and edit what the auto tool does please ? Thanks, Stuart

[Theresa J]

Sounds like you should create a develop preset that does an auto tone and the additional edits you want.

[Muddyboy]

OK, that's a good idea, thank you. Is there a way of creating a preset instruction that returns say the contrast to zero and it varies around 5, but is sometimes 6 or 7? What I mean is an instruction to re-zero, rather than contrast value -5.

[JohanElzenga]

Unfortunately, that is not possible. If you click 'Auto' in the preset options dialog, then all sliders that are adjusted by Auto Tone will not be selectable, or setting them won't do anything because the Auto Tone adjustments override them.

[john beardsworth · Accepted solution]

Following on from Johan's point, create a preset with zero vibrance etc and run than immediately after Auto Tone. In Presets panel, out it in your Favorites.

[Bob Somrak]

You could use the customizable autotone in Jeffrey Friedl's Bag of Goodies shown here

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/bag-o-goodies#personalized-auto-tone

The easiest is to do what @john beardsworth suggested,  another preset to zero those items.

[Muddyboy]

Thank you to everyone that replied. I now realise that I can't do this in one click but I have created a simple preset (zero contrast, vibrance and saturation + 20 dehaze) and so I now click "Auto tone", then "Presets", then again on my new preset and I'm where I want to be. That's as opposed to clicking "Auto tone", then double clicking the three that I want to zero, and typing in 20 and return to dehaze, so much quicker. I really liked the idea of the customisable auto tone that Bob mentioned, but that still needs me to click on "File", "Plug in extras", then the plugin, so I think that I'm good just with the preset, which is what Bob suggested anyway.