Automatical RAW post processing problem

[Mr. Murmeli]

Hi,

I visited my sister and shot some photos of my nieces. But then my sister started taking a huge amount of photos with my camera as well. She's no pro, so the settings she used varied a lot. Because of this, some pictures are under-exposed, some pretty good, and some over-exposed.

Luckily the camera was set to RAW so the damage can be somewhat salvaged. But I simply don't have enough time and energy to go through hundreds of photos one by one (I've done it so many times before that I've become sick of it).

Usually the Photoshop's "Image Processor" does decent enough job for this kind of non-professional family shots. BUT: now that the exposures vary so much the image processor isn't sufficient anymore.

In Image Processor I opened the first picture in Camera Raw in order to apply settings. I tried using the "Auto" setting for all the Exposure, Recovery, Fill light, etc. settings but it doesn't do Auto for the rest of the pictures. Throughout the rest of the images it simply uses the exact settings which happened to work for the first picture.

Is there a program which would apply some sort of good enough "Auto" setting for the exposure and so on in each picture separately? Lightroom, perhaps?

 

[bigtwinky]

Good enough is a matter of perception. For me, there is no program that would apply a "good enough" level of auto processing. If I wanted "good enough", I'd just shoot JPG and not RAW and keep the camera on auto.

I know thats not a huge help, but I've never found anything where auto does a good enough job on images that have such varying exposure issues. If its slightly off, then auto might work, but not if there are more than just slight exposure issues

 

[Mr. Murmeli]

Good enough is a matter of perception. For me, there is no program that would apply a "good enough" level of auto processing. If I wanted "good enough", I'd just shoot JPG and not RAW and keep the camera on auto.

I know thats not a huge help, but I've never found anything where auto does a good enough job on images that have such varying exposure issues. If its slightly off, then auto might work, but not if there are more than just slight exposure issues

Thanks for the reply. Though, I have to disagree with the jpeg and full auto settings. I was pretty certain I'd get exactly this kind of answer immediately since I'm very well aware of the fact that no automatic program can produce as good results as human eye and "manual labour". But I know how crappy jpeg pictures can look when taken indoors in dimm light. And I also know that processing similar raw pictures with Camera Raw's auto setting does, on average, beat that full auto jpeg alternative (at least that's my opinion). Camera Raw's auto is far from perfect. Even my manual post processing produces better results.

But as I said earlier, these specific pictures don't really need to be perfect and I'd be satisfied with camera raw's automatic settings for at least most of them. But I don't want to go and click auto for each of those photos individually. Then it wouldn't make much of a difference to just do them all properly. ;-)

 

[table1349]

Simple answer is no. As bigtwinky eluded to automatic settings are a front end process, not a post processing one.

 

[bigtwinky]

I know Lightroom can do batch processing and sync the changes to pictures. So you can adjust one and then have it adjust others.

I have used it to adjust white balance where that one image would be set to "As shot" but I want it to "Auto" white balance as its making a slight difference. I can do the change to the first and sync with the others.

However, the auto exposure button doesn't seem to work the same way. I don't have a drop down list of values to chose from which then it syncs with other images, as the Auto feature changes the image on an image per image basis, as not all images need a +0.25 exposure change (as an example) which is your case.

So I'm not even sure that LR or Bridge would solve your dilema.