ACR "Auto" control

Snapper

In every version of ACR I've used (and maybe in my Lightroom demo too, IIRC) the "Auto" button, which can be useful in some respects, always adds an insane amount of Brightness to the image. It's so obviously incorrect that it seems like a bug, albeit a long-standing one.

"Auto" will increase exposure a little if it thinks the photo is underxposed; will increase the "Blacks" slightly; will increase "Recovery" a tad if there are blown highlights. But "Brightness"? Woah! Off the scale! 50 or more and way, way blown.

I know the best way is to treat each image separately, but this just seems so out of kilter. I wonder if anyone else has noticed?

BinaryFx

Ian, Brightness defaulted to 50 and Contrast to 25 in early "simple" versions of ACR (before auto), as the built in ''toned' starting point. Some consider this too strong while others like the similar feel to a camera baked JPEG. Is the auto setting also applying another separate tone curve, on top of the "hidden" curve behind B/C on the basic tab? Depending on the subject, you may also experience loss of detail due to the saturation increase of using such tonal mapping commands in ACR/ALR, which may need to be recovered in the converter by selective desaturation, negative vibrance, exposure, white balance (or rendering a flatter image and working it in Photoshop proper, where one has more control over saturation increases with tonal edits).

Stephen Marsh.
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/

arodney

Like every auto setting (Photoshop and elsewhere), your mileage may vary. Sometimes it works well, sometimes partially well, some times it sucks. Its a starting point. Like all rendering controls, you simply need to alter the settings to produce a color appearance you hope to achieve. Raw is Grayscale data, you're baking the eventual pixels to produce a color and tone you want, there's no correct.

This might help, a superb article by Karl Lang on rendering the print from a scene referred Raw image:

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/family/prophotographer/pdfs/pscs3_renderprint.pdf

jfriend

Snapper wrote:

In every version of ACR I've used (and maybe in my Lightroom demo too, IIRC) the "Auto" button, which can be useful in some respects, always adds an insane amount of Brightness to the image. It's so obviously incorrect that it seems like a bug, albeit a long-standing one.

"Auto" will increase exposure a little if it thinks the photo is underxposed; will increase the "Blacks" slightly; will increase "Recovery" a tad if there are blown highlights. But "Brightness"? Woah! Off the scale! 50 or more and way, way blown.

I know the best way is to treat each image separately, but this just seems so out of kilter. I wonder if anyone else has noticed?

My experience is that the auto setting is a good starting point for most of my images, but there are definitely some images that I have to turn it off on - particularly ones with odd lighting. By design, it tries to expand or contract the tones in your image to fit in the full tonal range. If your image isn't supposed to fill the whole tonal range, then auto will overdo it.

If you are finding that auto is not good for any of your images, then I wonder if something is messed up in your configuration. Since you mention brightness, I would wonder if your monitor calibration is off (it is common for monitors these days to default to values that are way too bright). Could you also have changed the defaults in ACR in any way by saving new defaults? If you want to share a RAW file that illustrates this problem for you, we could see how auto works in our setup.

rwells

When opening pics from a "shoot", I'll make my initial adjustments, then hit the little triangle on the upper right corner, then select this as the new default setting.

This lets me work through the "shoot" pictures and when each is pulled up in ACR, it applies my "new" default setting. This gets me very close on the rest of the pics so that I only have to make slight, if any changes.

You can always reset to the ACR default at any time you like.


Hope that helps.

Snapper

Thanks for your replies folks. I'll do what John suggests and post an example or two. I'm pretty sure it's not my monitor: when I hit "Auto" and the Brightness increases by a large amount, the highlight warning indicates that there is a lot of clipping going on.

I'm also fairly sure that it's not the way anything is set up or installed. I've clean-installed Lightroom demos a couple of times in the last year, and recently clean-installed PhotoShop CS3.

jfriend

Snapper wrote:

Thanks for your replies folks. I'll do what John suggests and post an example or two. I'm pretty sure it's not my monitor: when I hit "Auto" and the Brightness increases by a large amount, the highlight warning indicates that there is a lot of clipping going on.

I'm also fairly sure that it's not the way anything is set up or installed. I've clean-installed Lightroom demos a couple of times in the last year, and recently clean-installed PhotoShop CS3.

Are you shooting RAW files? If so, we'll need to see the actual RAW files to see how they behave in our copy of ACR.

Snapper

jfriend wrote:

Are you shooting RAW files? If so, we'll need to see the actual RAW files to see how they behave in our copy of ACR.

Roger that.