- Exposure
- Contrast
- Highlights and Shadows
- Whites and Blacks
- Auto Tone setting
From the book
From the book
From the book
Auto Tone setting
The Auto Tone (
[Mac] or 
[PC]) can work well on a great many images as a quick-fix tone adjustment (see Figure 4.30). It automatically sets the Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks. Note that you can also use 
plus a double-click to apply an auto setting to these sliders independently. From there you can adjust any of the Basic panel sliders to manually fine-tune an auto adjustment. An auto tone adjustment can be undone by double-clicking the Tone button next to Auto, or you can use the 
[Mac] or 
[PC] shortcut to reset everything.
An Auto adjustment can sometimes make an instant improvement. Or it may not do much at all because the tone adjustments were close to being correct anyway (see sidebar). It is ridiculous to expect an automatic function such as this to perform flawlessly every time, but for the most part, I find Auto Tone works well the majority of the time, especially since the Auto Tone logic has been improved with each subsequent version of Lightroom. Even if Auto Tone does not produce perfect results, what it does produce can often be a useful starting point for applying further edits. Auto Tone can also be included as part of a Develop preset, allowing you to import images with Auto Tone applied right from the start.
- Here is a before image in
which the Lightroom Basic
adjustments have been set
to the Lightroom defaults
and the White Balance is
using the As Shot White Balance
setting (as recorded by the
camera). I began by selecting
the White Balance tool (
)
to click on a nonreflective
neutral color. In this example
I hovered the cursor over
the clouds. Note that if
the Auto Dismiss option is
unchecked in the Toolbar,
you can keep clicking to
sample new white balance
settings and press the key
again to return the White
Balance tool to the dock.
The RGB percentage readouts
where I had clicked with
the White Balance tool now
showed a more neutral balance. - I dragged the Exposure slider to the right to lighten the image. When making this adjustment you simply adjust the Exposure until the image appears to have the right brightness. I didn’t need to worry too much about overdoing the Exposure as there was little risk of the highlight detail clipping.
- I then dragged the Contrast slider to the right to increase the tone contrast.
- Once the Exposure and Contrast had been set, I dragged the Highlights slider to the left in order to bring out more detail in the midtone to highlight regions of the photo.
- The Shadows slider allowed me to independently adjust the shadow to midtone regions. Here, I raised the Shadows in order to lighten the shadow tones.
- I now needed to fine-tune
the highlight and shadow
clipping points. To do this
I adjusted the Whites and
Blacks sliders as shown here.
It is at this stage that
it can be useful to hold
down the
key
to see a threshold clipping
preview for the whites and
blacks. For example, it is
usually best to allow the
shadows to just start to
clip. In this example you
can see the threshold preview
as I adjusted the Blacks
slider. - Here is the final version where you can see the result of the Whites and Blacks adjustment. Note I also added a small amount of Clarity.
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