Is PhotoLemur really an Automatic Fixer?

Photolemur, from Skylum, introduces itself as the world’s first fully automated photo enhancer powered by Artificial Intelligence. A big claim, and does it live up to the claim.

Maybe it Does!

It probably isn’t the total magic autofix app, that photographic postprocessing killer. However it is very neat and does a really wonderful job with exposure, tonal balancing and colour. It’s probably close to weaning me off the need for HDR to get photos that look like I remember the light was when I took the photo. Having said that there is one feature that is sure to appeal to those that avoid post processing photos. There is only one button (the export) and one slider (the paint brush dot), which activates  a nice screen width slider which allows you to control the amount of “boost” from the the original to fully enhanced. I would love to understand how the AI works in detail and I don’t yet, but I am impressed this is a significant step in the right direction. Specifically it is touch sceen friendly so perfect for my little HP spectre.

If you act fast you can get both a free trial (with the watermark) and/or buy it for a great preorder price today at PhotoLemur.

AutoTonal Fixes & Jpeg

ost packages these days offer an autofix solution for “correcting” the tonal range in an image, which normally means stretching the range by increasing the contrast and manoeuvring the exposure/brightness. They mostly work, underexposed images will be lightened and overexposure images will be darkened, and some extra detail will appear. However these processes/filters can come spectacularly unstuck when the exposure is heavily clipped (clipping is an adobe-centric term to described when the exposure intensity falls below the minimum recordable, ie black or above the maximum recordable ie white). This clipping will be visible as vertical lines on the right or left hand edges of the intensity histogram. The image I’m using for this series is clipped a little on the black side, but not that significantly.

Original Jpeg (as Shot)	After Auto Levels	Perfectly Clear

If you look at the exposure intensity histograms under each image you see what has been done by each step. The original jpeg image does not capture the full range of exposures, they are grouped to the left og the histogram. The auto level fix has stretched the available pixels to fill the histogram. Because there is less detail in the information to begin with, when this is stretched across the full range there will be some new intensities that get missed, the new locations for originally adjacent exposure in a nice gradient of light will now be two or more illumination values apart, leaving a little gap, which can produce stripping in the nice gradient, and sometimes this becomes very obvious and distracting. The perfect clear filter has done a similar stretch but has less mini peaks.

All on these images still have a very dark shadow in the foreground and probably a bit more post processing could be justified.

AfterShot Pro’s Perfectly Clear filter, is a bit of a secret sauce, but I find I prefer using it to any other AutoFix solution because it gives me a better idea of a what an image is capable of. The ones I want to rank as worthy of further work in the future. On occasion I need a jpeg version to post on the web straight away, and perfectly clear probably does the best job in most situations, with just a single click. (Perfectly Clear also works with RAW images).

Google+ photos has a featured called Auto Enhance which is turned on and set to normal by default. It works well most of the time, but if you think your images is just to contrasty, or looks posterized you can turn it off or change it individually on the photo page under edit, or change the default setting under the google+ settings. If you are only uploading jpeg photos, from your phone the normal setting will probably do a good job 90% plus of the time.

So be careful with Autofix as a solution to extend your dynamic range. There are better solutions to come in this series but it is well worth having a play with these settings/filters in your package of choice.

Cambridge in colour has a good introduction to Understanding Image Histograms

RAW Sunrise post processed three ways

These are all processed from the same RAW file. The Sunrise only glimpsed between the clouds this morning and I did manage one shoot, but it is overblown on the horizon and a bit glum elsewhere else, A typical flat RAW file from a high contrast scene. so I decided to see what my software could independently do with the same basic task of balancing the image tonality. Hover you mouse over the pictures to see details.
I think this just goes to show that while I may prefer to do the tonal tweaking myself but by using AfterShot Pro’s perfectly clear single click adjustment will give me a very good idea of what is possible. The rest is personal preference and judgement.

To ae or not to ae, that is the question?

I’m talking about google+’s auto AwesomE feature, its something that you get for free, but already I’m underwhelmed by the snowing effect. I’m also not so sure about the auto enhance, which frequently transforms my carefully processed photos into less that complimentary ways. However enough of the complaining, I will have to admit there have been a few nice surprises.
HDR when you least expect it and more importantly done with some constraint. Actually they are predicatable because they are only done with bracketted sequences with suitable exposure steps, taken with HDR in mind.
The PANOramas have been a slightly more hit and miss affair, I always take a number of shots of ant location in a roughly overlapping fashion. So I have gotten a fair number of very average results with exposure banding as the camera light meter adjusted the exposure. I’m also a bit puzzled because a number of image sets I would have expected to make a great panorama have been made into MOTION auto awesome’s .GIFS format that pan across the scene!
So the question remains should I turn off Auto Awesome  and miss out on these goodies. Well As long as you only upload photos in standard size (which in google+ terms means 2048 pixels or less on the longest dimension) any auto awesome photos will not count against your disk storage limit. You can find where this is set under the settings tab on the AutoBackup Application on your computer (or in your mobile app). So any Auto Awesomes are created automatically and for free. As +Ananda Sim pointed out in the comment to my Auto Imposition post the auto awesome is a copy and there is no penalty to you letting them be created. The other issues is do you want to disable these and/or the auto enhance feature, These settings can be found on-line in your google+ profile, under the setting item at the bottom of the pull down list on the right hand side of the screen. Then look about half way down, just under the storage details. At least for the time being I will be leaving both on.

Web Based Lighting Photofix

You don't have to have the latest and greatest photo editing software to get access to some good basic photo fix routines. After cropping, and straightening, improving lighting is probably the most desirable fix. However this is often a multi-step process.



This is a one step automatic automatic lighting correction called DxO lighting is available as a net based fix from the Fd's flickr toys site (which has a lot of other fun photo manipulation toys). Even if you don't have a flickr accont you can use this site, but it is flickr oriented. If you like the results and want to look at the commercial package check out the DxO site.