What did Auto Fix do?

Rhuarc

I had this picture of a flower that I took, and I thought it looked just fine, but then I clicked on Auto Smart Fix in Elements 4, and this was the result.

1) How am I supposed to know if an image needs any adjustment? With this picture I thought it looked just fine, but then when the adjustment was made I realized that this actually looks better (I think??)

2) What exactly did it do to the picture? Did it just adjust the Birghtness and Contrast, or did it do things with curves and such too?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Original Picture EXIF


Adjusted Picture

ShannonW

I think it looks better before the auto fix and doesn't need any adjustments. I am not sure what the auto fix does b/c I tend to not use it. It looks like it enhanced the color and over corrected the contrast of the background. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

morrisphotography2003

Rhuarc wrote:

I had this picture of a flower that I took, and I thought it looked just fine, but then I clicked on Auto Smart Fix in Elements 4, and this was the result.

1) How am I supposed to know if an image needs any adjustment? With this picture I thought it looked just fine, but then when the adjustment was made I realized that this actually looks better (I think??)

2) What exactly did it do to the picture? Did it just adjust the Birghtness and Contrast, or did it do things with curves and such too?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Original Picture EXIF


Adjusted Picture

ok my thoughts are simply, when you review your photos to make the needed adjustments you need to pick a known color area in the photo and make your changes from that spot as long as you DO NOT change the main subject, (ie. grey is grey.)
What I can see from these photos is the flower is yellow in both versions but if you will look at the people in the background you will notice that in the first w/o PS you can see that the person is wearing BLUE jeans.
The PS'd version the person is now wearing a PURPLE pair of jeans.
Also the background flowers changed from purple to blue.
It all comes down to what you want to do but it is my "opinion" that the non-PS'd version is more eye appealing.
Bob.

colourbox

I don't know how AutoFix works, but if it's based on the Auto Color choices (the ones you can override in Photoshop), then it's going to try to neutralize the black point, white point, and midtones, and it will try to increase contrast by clipping a certain percentage of shadow and highlight values. It does this without knowing the subject matter of the photo.

If you notice, the brown soil has lost its color and gone gray. I am guessing Auto Fix tried to neutralize the midtones, which in this photo are not gray like in an "average" photo, but are supposed to be brown, so making it gray was wrong. Auto Fix didn't know it was soil.

The jeans may have shifted purple because they were in a tonal range also occupied by dark green leaves. In attempting to neutralize them it may have decided to add red to that range. Adding red to blue makes it purple. That might have been the cause.

Any automatic adjustment will work best if the photo's highlights, shadows, and midtones are neutral in real life. If they're not neutral and that's correct, like a field of flowers with not a lot of white, black, or gray in the picture, any automatic attempt to turn large colored areas into gray will be incorrect. This photo is a good candidate for manual adjustment.

Rhuarc

ANd here i thought everyone was going to say that the original had too much of a yellow cast and the Auto Fix adjusted the yellow cast out of the picture! It seems the I have a lot to learn! So basically do you guys think that the orignial is fine the way it is, or could it use some adjustment, and if so what? Thanks so much for the help! Lol, I hope you guys don't get tired of my questions. I'm still new to this so I'm going to be having lots of questions on how to fix different photos till I start getting the hang of it!

jfriend

Some ideas...

Rhuarc wrote:

ANd here i thought everyone was going to say that the original had too much of a yellow cast and the Auto Fix adjusted the yellow cast out of the picture! It seems the I have a lot to learn! So basically do you guys think that the orignial is fine the way it is, or could it use some adjustment, and if so what? Thanks so much for the help! Lol, I hope you guys don't get tired of my questions. I'm still new to this so I'm going to be having lots of questions on how to fix different photos till I start getting the hang of it!

The original is pretty nice. I like it better than the auto-fixed one. Here are some things you could consider doing to it if you wanted to play:

• I'd crop it slightly to remove the non-flower portion of the image at the top so all you see is flowers.
• You could show a little more detail in the yellow flower by lowering the brightness a bit. The eye can't see detail very well in really bright things. This is also probably not going to print as bright as you see it on your screen (it exceeds what smugmug can print through ezprints). Two things you could do to achieve this are use a little highlight adjustment (from shadow/highlights) or a little curve adjustment.
• Fix the tear in the yellow flower petal with the spot healing brush.
• You could sharpen it a bit more to emphasize the colored streaks in the yellow flower.

Here's one with some of those things done to it. It's lost a little of the yellow brilliance (which I'm not sure I like better), but you can now see more detail in the flower and these colors could be printed. The non-flower part of the background has been cropped out and I added some sharpening.

Rhuarc

How are you able to tell what colors could be printed? I really like what you did with the picture? THe biggest thing I like is that you cropped out the top. I hadn't thought of doing that. I'm a little on the fence about the brightness. On one hand I like that I can see the details of the flower in the one you changed, but I like the brilliant yellow of the original. Also, what did you do the sharpening for? Was there something specific that you were trying to sharpen, or was the whole picture just too soft? I'm going to fool around with the original in photoshop and see if I can duplicate what you did.
Thanks so much for all the help!!

Edit: Ok, one other thing. I know that every time you edit a JPEG file it loses quality. Now, these changes to this JPEG would be the second time it has been saved, (when the picture was taken being the first time) Now if I need to go in and recrop it for printing say an 8x10 or 5x7 can I just crop and print without saving so that I don't lose the quality of that next JPEG save?

jfriend

A few answers

Rhuarc wrote:

How are you able to tell what colors could be printed? I really like what you did with the picture? THe biggest thing I like is that you cropped out the top. I hadn't thought of doing that. I'm a little on the fence about the brightness. On one hand I like that I can see the details of the flower in the one you changed, but I like the brilliant yellow of the original. Also, what did you do the sharpening for? Was there something specific that you were trying to sharpen, or was the whole picture just too soft? I'm going to fool around with the original in photoshop and see if I can duplicate what you did.
Thanks so much for all the help!!

Edit: Ok, one other thing. I know that every time you edit a JPEG file it loses quality. Now, these changes to this JPEG would be the second time it has been saved, (when the picture was taken being the first time) Now if I need to go in and recrop it for printing say an 8x10 or 5x7 can I just crop and print without saving so that I don't lose the quality of that next JPEG save?

I'm on the fence too about the brightness change.

What I was trying to do with the sharpening is enhance the fine details in the middle of the yellow flower to show them even more. I just used Smart Sharpen (which I think is in Elements 4). Most everything else is out of the depth-of-field so sharpening won't affect anything else.

I agree that the crop helps a lot. While removing the top, I kept the same aspect ratio and made sure that I didn't position the flower in the middle. The rule of thirds suggests that the eye likes to find major interest points on 1/3 or 2/3 points in the image, so I stayed away from the dead center.

Photoshop CS2 (not Elements 4 unfortunately) has a feature called soft proofing. If you load a profile from a particular printer, CS2 can tell you which colors in your image are outside the range of what the printer can print and it can simulate what the image will look like when those colors that can't be printed are converted to colors that are in the range of the printer. Very bright colors are often on the edge of what a printer can print so it triggered me to check this on your image. If you print it as is, it will probably still look very nice, but likely won't be quite as brilliant a yellow because of the limitations of the printer. But, it's printer-specific. I was using the ezprints profile which is smugmug's printer.

Repeated edit/saves/close/open/edit/save cycles from a JPEG original are undesirable. If you save with a JPEG high quality and have a high res original and you are not making massive, global editing changes each time you edit, I'd be surprised if you could notice any difference after 2 or 3 JPEG saves. If you make large changes multiple times or use a lower JPEG quality (less than 10), a trained eye might see degradation after the 2nd or 3rd save. For cropping, you can either load the image, crop, print and not save. Or you can load the image, crop and save to a different filename (I often put the crop in the filename so I can easily see that this is the 8x10 version). In my own work, I generally don't worry about 2 saves to JPEG, but try to avoid more than that. If I know I will be editing it multiple times or am likely to, I just save it as a PSD file (that also keeps all layers) instead because that is lossless.

Rhuarc

Lol, I'm glad you liked the position of the flower. I used to do everything dead center, and then when I was composing this shot I remembered someone here telling me about the rule of thirds, so I deliberatley tried to do that!

So basically if I've already done all the post I need to on a picture and all I need to do is print in a different size the best thing is just to open the picture and print without saving.

As far as the printer profiles go, I have the Canon IP6000D. Where could I find a color profile for that? I'm really interested to try out that feature of photoshop to see if many of my pictures are coming out different. THanks so much for the help! As I'm sure you are beginning to realize I have a lot to learn, but I'm trying!