{"id":2860,"date":"2018-04-20T13:55:33","date_gmt":"2018-04-20T04:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2018-04-20\/2860"},"modified":"2018-04-20T13:55:33","modified_gmt":"2018-04-20T04:55:33","slug":"personalizing-lightrooms-amazing-new-auto-tone-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2018-04-20\/2860","title":{"rendered":"Personalizing Lightroom’s Amazing New “Auto Tone” Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Nikkor 70-200mm f\/2.8 @ 130mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>640 sec, f<\/span>\/2.8, ISO 140 —\nimage data<\/a><\/span>\nUnrelated Cherry-Blossom Snow<\/span>\nthis photo, from this recent photoshoot<\/a>, has nothing to do with this post\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n

Lightroom 7.2 introduced an entirely new version of its “<\/span>Auto Tone”<\/span>\nfeature, a one<\/span>-click adjustment of photo brightness and contrast to hopefully-pleasing results. The prior<\/span> version of Auto Tone used what might be called a “<\/span>stupid, brute\nforce”<\/span> method that merely adjusted tone ranges to try find a numeric<\/span>\nbalance. It wasn't very useful.<\/p>\n\n

The new Auto Tone, however, is fantastic, being powered by an artificial-intelligence engine trained with thousands of\nhand-tweaked photos from highly-regarded artists. It does a<\/span> sufficiently-good job that I now<\/span> use it as part of my new-photo workflow, to give me a better<\/span> starting point\nfor my own edits. (I should<\/span> point out, though, that a good<\/i> photographer wouldn't need any kind of\nbetter starting point for edits; a good<\/i> photographer will do the work prior to pressing the shutter button. I'm not a<\/span> good<\/i> photographer.)<\/p>\n\n

As good as the new Auto Tone is, I've found it tends to be a bit<\/span> heavy handed with saturation for my\ntastes. I gather<\/span> that the artists who worked on the photos used to train the AI engine simply prefer to\nlay on heavy saturation to make the photo “<\/span>pop”<\/span>, and perhaps this is\nwhy they are highly regarded and I am<\/span> not, but it seems cheap to me. I'd\nprefer<\/span> not to use that as my starting point.<\/p>\n\n

So, to help quicken my workflow in this area, I added<\/span> new features to my Bag of Goodies plugin for Lightroom<\/a> that allow one to perform\na personalized Auto Tone<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Your personalizations are configured in a dialog<\/span> brought up by invoking:<\/p>\n

File > Plugin Extras > Configure Personalized Auto Tone and Apply<\/center>\n\n

The configuration dialog is this monstrosity:<\/p>\n\n

<\/div>\n\n

The plugin allows each of the nine develop settings that Auto Tone touches to be canceled, scaled back, or enhanced. The details<\/span> are explained on the plugin home page<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Note that even though the new Auto Tone was introduced in Lightroom 7.2,<\/span> the plugin requires 7.3 to\nwork, as that's when Adobe added the hooks that make the plugin possible.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lightroom 7.2 introduced an entirely new version of its \"Auto Tone\" feature, a one-click adjustment of photo brightness and contrast to hopefully-pleasing results. The prior version of Auto Tone used what might be called a \"stupid, brute force\" method that merely adjusted tone ranges to try find a numeric balance. It wasn't very useful.<\/p>

The new Auto Tone, however, is fantastic, being powered by an artificial-intelligence engine trained with thousands of hand-tweaked photos from highly-regarded artists. It does a sufficiently-good job that I now use it as part of my new-photo workflow, to give me a better starting point for [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2860"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2860\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}