Lightroom 3 vs Photoshop AUTO ADJUSTMENTS

[rogan200]

Against the general trend, I use Lightroom for ingesting, captioning and processing my sports images pitchside. I find it works well for me and love that my shots are then catalogued in one piece of software and searchable down the line. Most sports pros use PhotoMechanic and Photoshop together to do what I thought was the same thing.

On the advice of Jamesb84 i had a play with PhotoMechanic and Photoshop, and tbh it works well but I'm still probably happy with what I know at the moment. One thing jumped out at me though. James had said that he usually does an Auto Tone and Auto Colour in Photoshop which surprised me.... In Lightroom the Auto adjustments rarely work and are really inconsistent.... in high contrast images auto tone always massively overexposes, and Auto White Balance for floodlight stuff is equally useless. Had a play with the Auto Options in Photoshop for some images I shot yesterday and the Auto Tone and Colour actually worked amazingly well... they were spot on even for very contrasty images with a slight colour cast.... results probably slightly better than some of the stuff i sent earlier in the day to my agency which is a worry!

Question therefore is why are two Adobe imaging products (both Photoshop products) clearly handling Auto Adjustments completely differently, one working perfectly and one not at all? Anyone else experienced this, have an idea why, or know how to make LR work properly!!

 

[Chappers]

If you are doing the Auto settings in Photoshop after the image has been imported the it will be using a different imaging system to Lightroom. The Auto tone in Lightroom is the same as in ACR and works on the RAW image. The processed image in Photoshop will probably be using a different algorithm than ACR/ Lightroom

Can't say why there is a difference, as I've not tried the Photoshop options you use.Although I tend to prefer to use the individual sliders within Lightroom, I have found that the Auto tone facility when used does work reasonably well, although as I said I'm not a big user of it

 

[DemiLion]

Rogan, you might want to PM Tobers about this. From what I can remember he's also using LR3 at pitchside as well and may be able to give you an answer.

There could well be something in the fact that LR import is mainly oriented towards RAW rather than Jpeg capture (I presume that you're shooting in Jpeg) and that the engine is handling the files differently, but I haven't done enough comparisons to comment accurately.

 

[ama-photography]

I personally would auto anything, but if i had to lightroom