# Recommendation as to Auto Tone Adjustments



## sapnho (May 2, 2012)

Would you recommend turning Auto Tone Adjustments in the settings or does it screw up the optimum workflow of working your way down the sliders?


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## Jimmsp (May 2, 2012)

Personally, I use Auto Tones a lot as a good place to start. At a minimum, it sets the whites and blacks well initially.
There are some photos, however, it doesn't do a good job on, but most are fine.
Even when it it isn't "perfect", I think it speeds up my workflow.


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## JimHess43 (May 2, 2012)

I think this is one of those choices that is a matter of personal taste.  I don't use auto-tone.  I have taken the time to adjust my camera defaults so that when images are downloaded the settings I want are applied.  Those settings work in most cases.  Of course, additional fine tuning is often required, but my starting point is almost always very good.


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## rNeil (May 4, 2012)

Auto-tone in Lr4 seems to dump a LOT of my shadows into pure black (from my D3), and drops what should be shadows-with-detail into those near-black featureless places ... and at the same time lifts the high mids to near-white in a lot of images ... really bizarre. Bottom half of the values dumped way down, a few mids stretched way out, and the top third compressed past all reason.

Right now, I'm stuck working every bloody image one at a time ... there's got to be something I'm not aware of here!

Neil


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## Jimmsp (May 5, 2012)

Neil,
This seems somewhat bizarre. I shoot a Canon 60D, which is similar to yours, and the misbehavior I get is far different. It is all on the dark side.
Take a look at http://www.lightroomqueen.com/commu...-Massive-Auto-Tone-difference-in-a-baaaad-way where auto toning is discussed. An email is given for Eric Chan in the 2nd post who is a developer. Send him a few of your raw files and a note. I did.
Jim


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## rNeil (May 5, 2012)

I get the same thing ... and yet, in some images of last summer where there was yellow straw laying on the ground, in ones next to each other as far as time ... taken a few feet apart and facing almost exactly the same point of the compass ... one has way too dark midtones, the other ... nearly blown. Weird.

I've seen in both that thread and others that Mr. Chan is getting a ton of pics sent with the same behaviors already. Wouldn't love to be him right now ...


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## kbfoot (May 11, 2012)

For me, I employ Auto when I know I'm going to have make substantial adjustments(read:spend time) on a file;  I'd guess that it does something nice(saving me some basic adjustment time) in about one out of twenty times I try it.  They should put a little slot machine icon next to the Auto button.  I find the Auto function's behavior a little less predictable in LR4 than LR3.X so far.


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## clee01l (May 11, 2012)

The {AutoTone} button lets LR make adjustments to the Basic parameters based upon calculations made from the image data itself. Currently {AutoTone} is broken.  But that does not mean that it is also useless.  In LR3 (when it was not broken) the {AutoTone} works reasonably well.  By "reasonably" I mean that there was som necessary additional tweaking of these Basic parameters.  This still holds true in LR4 although AutoTone is more likely to be wron than it is to be right.  My problem with AutoTone in LR4 is that it tends to overexposed by  1 to 2 stops.  If I don't like the AutoTone results, I can fix it by moving one or two sliders.  If it don't use AutoTone, I have to manually move all the Basic sliders.  Even broken as it is in LR4, AutoTone is less manual adjustment than not using AutoTone.


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