LR4 auto tone continues to be a disaster?

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
March 7, 2012
12 replies
58788 views

How is it that Photoshop's auto tone can produce such pleasing results, yet Lightroom's auto tone can be so wildly off the mark? This is not a recent LR4 thing, it's been a problem ever since Lightroom was released 6 years ago and Photoshop's auto tone has worked well as far back as I can remember. It just baffles me that this feature of LR still hasn't been fixed in this latest release. Lightroom's auto tone feature, as it stands, is essentially useless and I see many people posting similar experiences. It's erratic too... sometimes setting exposure wildly too high, other times wildly too low. It seems it's biggest problem is in setting exposure. All I ask for is an auto tone that behaves like Photoshop because I don't have time to manually tweak all of my photos.

Any insights on why this behaviour might be?

Does anyone have any suggestions? I saw a few people suggesting manually tweaking the text of the preset (e.g. turn off auto exposure).

I trust I'm not alone in this frustration?

Does anyone have experience with Aperture?

I realize there can never be a magic "fix any photo" button, but it would be so helpful if Lightroom could at least give me a good starting point. As it stands, I have to manually adjust every photo, which is fine for my favourite shots, but way too time consuming to perform on the rest (either I do that or I edit in Photoshop, which kind of defeats the purpose of having Lightroom in the first place).

cheers

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DirgleAuthor

Participating Frequently

Great, happy to provide. Like I said, will do when I get home.

re. "any", I just haven't yet seen an example in my catalog where it works well, and every case I have tested performs better in Photoshop. I assume you would like a test cases that are extreme? Are you looking for the actual file or just an image of the results? Did you have a peak at the R_a_V_e_N example?

cheers

L

Lee Jay

Inspiring

PS's auto and LR's auto work in fundamentally different ways, and have to because the controls and the ability of those controls is completely different.

Imagine looking at nothing but the histogram and using nothing but the LR sliders to adjust your images. Could you do much better?

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DirgleAuthor

Participating Frequently

But I presume PS makes it's adjustments based on just analyzing the histogram(s) as well, no? You're probably right in that a piece of the problem is likely that Lightroom is stuck having to manipulate the histogram with its sliders, whereas Photoshop had do as it pleases. But to me, that still doesn't explain why Lightroom is so off. If both programs had the same "target" histogram(s), presumably Lightroom could at least get close. Also, if that were the case we'd hope that results with PV2012 would have improved... but they are just as disastrous. From what I can tell, Lightroom's algorithm isn't even in the right ballpark for some reason.

MadManChan2000

Adobe Employee

Would be great if you could post an example original file. Providing real examples is what gets the ball rolling on improvements for future versions.

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