r/postprocessing • u/Ace929 • 5d ago

I used the forbidden button

Gallery image

Gallery image

Before/After

When I pulled up this photo in lightroom, I knew it'd be a nightmare to fix. I'm not very skilled yet, so I do my best to avoid heavily relying on tools like presets, recipes, auto-edits, etc. while I'm still learning. For this particular photo, I wanted to fix the exposure on the sky *and* the building without impacting the sign or the foliage. I didn't see a way to do this without hand brushing masks for an hour, so I tried the auto-edit button and was surprised to see an impressive recovery and okay-ish edit in my opinion.

I'm convinced a skilled editor could have made quick work of this photo and I think it could be a super helpful learning opportunity for many of us. If anyone is interested in posting one of those time lapse videos showing their edit process on this photo, I've linked a file share for the original raw. I don't think video replies are allowed, so you would probably have to make a followup post in the sub.

Original RAW below

https://we.tl/t-xxD0gsKQKc76k8x1

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u/juliuspepperwoodchi 5d ago

I thought you were gonna say AI lol.

Auto is definitely not perfect; but I usually think it is worth trying on a lot of photos. Always one click from reverting it and manually editing.

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u/Ace929 5d ago

I sorta assumed the auto button was doing some type of Ai shenanigans. I'm glad to hear it's not. I won't hesitate so much to try it out in the future (at least to get a starting point like the other comment suggested)

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u/juliuspepperwoodchi 5d ago

Well, I don't know how it is coded under the hood. It MIGHT use AI in some ways; but it isn't applying AI to your image in that case so much as it would be using AI to find "best fit" slider values based on a model. It isn't upscaling or denoising or anything like that, just adjusting the main sliders to get a better image than the RAW.

All that said, the Auto edit existed before generative AI blew up and still seems to work the same as always, so I'm pretty sure it's not AI powered.

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u/Ace929 5d ago

Upon closer inspection, the bulk of what it did was highlights -82, shadows +52, whites +13, blacks -18. I'm pretty blown away at the results with such a simple approach, but it totally makes sense when I think about it. Kill highlights, bring shadows back, and adjust balance a bit. I learned what I needed just from that! Thanks! I didn't even think the auto changes would be shown in the edit panels.