Auto Smart Fix for Lightroom
It sounds like most folks think Lightroom 2.1 is the way to go. However it’s still missing the autofix controls from Elements:
Auto Smart Fix Corrects overall color balance and improves shadow and highlight detail, if necessary.
Auto Levels Adjusts the overall contrast of an image and may affect its color. If your image needs more contrast, and it has a color cast, try this command. Auto Levels works by individually mapping the lightest and darkest pixels in each color channel to black and white.
Auto Contrast Adjusts the overall contrast of an image without affecting its color. Use when your image needs more contrast, but the colors look right. Auto Contrast maps the lightest and darkest pixels in the image to white and black, which makes highlights appear lighter and shadows appear darker.
Auto Color Correction Adjusts the contrast and color by identifying shadows, midtones, and highlights in the image, rather than in individual color channels. It neutralizes the midtones and sets the white and black points using a default set of values.
Auto Sharpen Adjusts the sharpness of the image by clarifying the edges and adding detail that tonal adjustments may reduce.
Auto Red Eye Fix Automatically detects and repairs red eyes in an image.
Are there any plugins to add these capabilities? Could someone write one? Has anyone documented what these actually do at a technical level?
February 9th, 2009 at 4:01 PM
Auto Levels, Auto Contrast & Auto Color Correction: done by the “Auto” button on the tone section of the develop module. Works fairly well, though needs a bit of attention IMHO. You could also use auto white-balance under the “WB” section as well. This works fairly well if you shoot in RAW under incandescent, for example, with most DSLRs.
Auto Sharpen: you can adjust the “clarity” slider, and/or apply a fixed amount of sharpening either during “development” or using one of the preset sharpening values on export (for screen, print, etc).
Auto Red Eye Fix: don’t think you can do this automagically in LR yet, though their tool is quite good.
The fastest way to apply all these would be to create your own preset for all of them, then select all photos desired and apply the preset to them as a batch operation. I believe you can even apply a preset as part of import as well, saving you the hassle.
My current wishes for Lightroom are actually some video suppport (just playback of AVI and MOV, for example), better geoencoding support (though Jeffrey Friedl’s plugin is a good start), and facial recognition. Guess I should start learning objective C.
February 10th, 2009 at 4:18 AM
You can find many presets for LightRoom’s develop module, and some of them are basically “Auto Enhance.” Try these for instance: http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2009/presets-updated-auto-fix-preset-with-profiles/ (I have used them myself in a few situations.)
February 10th, 2009 at 8:50 AM
David, I’ve done some simple experiments auto-fixing the same photos in Lightroom 1.4.1 and Elements. Whatever it’s doing the Auto button there does not seem to be applying the same filters as Elements. The results in Lightroom do not seem as good to me; but I’ll double check that.
Romain, I’ll check out the presets you suggest. Thanks. However I’m not sure one preset will do the trick. If I understand it right, the presets are adjusting for known issues with a specific camera. My problem is that I’m often shooting a bird in bright light, then a spider in a dimly lit room, and then a beetle under a rock, with and without flash, one after the other. I need to correct variable lighting much more than systematic camera/lens aberrations.
February 10th, 2009 at 10:02 AM
I found the “Auto” buttons to be much more effective in 2.1 than in 1.x, FWIW.
February 10th, 2009 at 10:47 AM
That is useful information, Dolan. Thanks. I’ll give 2.1 a try and see how it goes.
February 14th, 2009 at 7:17 PM
I’m trying Lightroom 2 now. The auto fix seems better, though it has some annoying limitations like a complete inability to resize images or crop to a specific pixel count. (No, resizing on export does not count.) Also, the interface is vastly too cluttered. You have to keep switching from Library to Develop view, and even so you can’t see all the tools and settings on the screen at once.