The Elusive One-Click Instant Fix

From the very earliest days of digital photo editing software, developers have been trying to create the ultimate instant fix button. Whether it's labelled “quick fix”. “auto-correct” or “auto-balance”, google had “I’m feeling lucky” and later “auto-awesome”, the goal has always been the same: to make photo editing as simple and effortless as possible. However, despite numerous attempts, none of these one-click fixes have truly lived up to their promise.

The trouble is, while digital cameras have improved significantly over the years, they still can't cover every situation. And even when they do capture a great shot, there are often still some focus and exposure issues that need to be addressed. This is where photo editing software comes in, but finding the perfect balance between automated fixes and manual editing can be a challenge and all too often very tedious.

Over time, I started to warm up to auto-fix tools and even created my own preset for Lightroom called SDR+. However, I didn't use it much, as I found it was often quicker and more trustworthy to just fiddle with the exposure sliders manually.

It wasn't until I started experimenting with Macphun's Aurora HDR that I really began to see the potential of what AI (Artificial Intelligence, in the form of Neural Networks) could do. This software used the networks to segment the image into different areas, such as the sky, foreground, background, buildings, and foliage, and potentially correct those areas separately. However, this information wasn't shown to the user. It would have been nicer to have access to it through prebuilt masks. Just be patient that feature would eventually come.

However, the developers' approach was somewhat arrogantly more focused on "we’ll do it better than you" and releasing regular updates for users and expecting them to sit back and enthusiastically pay for what they were being fed.

Skylum’s Photo Lemur showed great promise when I was invited to beta test it. Having previously tested Nic's Collection and Snapseed when they were still Macphun, and also looking at a pre-release Windows version of Luminar, I could see that the big difference with Photo Lemur was its simplicity and ability to batch process many files in a reasonable amount of time. It did a good job, although not outstanding, especially for social media where post-processing excellence would go unnoticed. It's biggest appeal that you don’t have to do anything was also its biggest weakness, you really can not control anything. Still I bought it straight away and still occasionally use it.

Macphun became Skylum and their software creations Aurora HDR and Photo Lemur were great examples of how AI can enhance the editing experience and made it easier and more efficient for photographers to create beautiful images.

Looking back AI within photo editing was still in its early stages, slowly making small incremental steps usually with room for improvement. The really rapid expansion of the tasks AI could perform and the rate of improvement were about to explode

AI enhanced .vs. classic HDR

I’ve already commented that I am finding the jpeg straight out of my new Olympus camera fine for those quick uploads (eg instagram or email) where time is important. I also have Auroa HDR 2018 & now Photolemur 3.1 on my handy little HP spectre and both of these came give really great images from processing RAW files (.orf files) straight up with little intervention. So here I will to compare the three approaches.

Original Photo ISO 200 f11 1/320sec 42mm	3 Bracket Photo HDR	PhotoLemur AI Adjusted

There are differences, however they are subtle. I do see the two images derived from the RAW files to show better detail and crisper colour rendering. It probably then gets down to personal preferences which you like best. The classic HDR required three bracketed images (here at 1 EV steps) and then some time to merge, align the photos, tone map the HDR version, and a couple of personal manual tweaks (in this case polarization to get a bluer sky and lifting the exposure a little at the bottom of the image) perhaps 2 minutes of editing, compared with the 10-15 seconds that PhotoLemur takes to do its magic (automatically). Both are fast enough to appear pretty instant but I probably still prefer to spend the extra time on the classic HDR approach (which includes taking the three bracketed photos)

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

Its Perfectly Clear why she is becoming a new every day mistress

Having given up on choosing just one photo manager/post processing system I have been happier just using the software that seems most appropriate at the time (I often call this my many mistress project) One of the steps that I do want make sure is not tedious is what happens when I first load my photos and review them. This is one area that Lightroom has left me feeling there is a better way, other than running away to get a coffee and getting distracted. Infact my short trial of Photo Mechanic, opened me to the possibility that there was a better way. I also had become comfortable with doing a lot of this preview and culling in Picasa, which is much faster to load photos and very easy to use. The problem was that ranking and other organizational issues where just wasted on Lightroom

Enter AfterShot Pro, which is a much appreciated Christmas gift. At first it appeared to be duplicating a lot of Lightroom functionality. The really attractive part of this new mistress was the fact that you could just look at photos without having to import them all into its library. It does take a very short moment or two to build a thumbnail (on the fly) but its as easy as moving to the directory where the photos have been loaded (I still use picasa for this) using the navigation (browse) panel on the left of the screen. Choosing the appropriate view, must admit I swap around a bit but I prefer the Multi-Image View (as shown above).  The basic edit features are always there on the right (no changing modules as in Lightroom). I’ve already mentioned the little magnifier tools I still think its a gem. The fact that I can save my ranking and metadata to xmp files that Lightroom can pick up later is one reason I have started to do most of my previewing in AfterShot.  Like Lightroom (and Picasa) AfterShot Pro is a “non destructive” editor, the original photo remains unaltered and you can store its adjustments in an xmp file, the problem is this post processing isn’t compatible with Lightroom’s processing. I’ll probably write more on this later.

An unedited RAW image on a calibrated screen, can be a very boring thing. It often takes a fair few steps (ie not just Auto White Balance or Auto Tone in Lightroom) to see the potential of an image might have for further tweaking and post processing. Which brings me to another real gem I have discovered in AfterShot Pro. It now has the Perfectly Clear plug-in, built into the basic edit panel. This a an “image enhancer” (their term to differentiate themself from other “creative filter” plug-ins) by anthentech, which you can be still purchase separately as a desktop application or downloaded as a smart phone app. The details of their “science” make good reading, but they had me hooked when I saw the quote “Your “Enhancement” Software Takes the Camera Distortions and Makes Them Worse”. The proof though is in the pudding and I have always tried to me honest and fair in my evaluation of AUTO anything style claims. They usually fall short of the mark for me. However I love perfectly clear as I scroll though my photos because with one click I can see the potential of a raw image. It gives me a target to strive for in Lightroom later without having to invest a lot of time tweaking an image and not be able to transfer this to Lightroom. I will probably still try to do better with some manual tweaking later but I haven’t invested a lot of time, and if I’m in a hurry to email a proof or just upload an image to illustrate a blog post that one click is pretty much all I need to do. Perfectly Clear does work with jpeg as well, but it may not have as much potential to work with as the equivalent RAW file.

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.

… … Looking Forward

Looking into a crystal ball used to be a common past time at the new year. Rapid Technological change was always a key aspect of these predictions, yet this year the changes in photography might not be gleaming new toys you can pick up.

1. We’ll do better without you, the move to on-line storage and display has been a wealth of Auto-fix facilities. Even your humble photo processing service in the local shopping mall probably uses an “enhance” filter. A lot of this is gimmickry and little more that increased contrast and colour saturation. Some are based on science, particularly from the field of medical imaging and some have come down from fancy photoshop plug-ins. Corels inclusion of Perfectly Clear and Niks Software’s Snap Seed (now Google’s Auto Awesome) are good examples of what can be achieved. However if you are a creative you might need to fight this trend, at least recognise it.
2. Better user interface on cameras (particularly smartphones). In todays world cameras might have a few mechanical and optical functioning bit bits (particularly the bigger DSLR) but at their centre is now a lot of electronics. They are essentially specific purpose computers and as such are programmable. Some existing cannon camera can already have their firmware updated (see magic lantern). However it is in the smartphone camera arena that the changes are most evident. There are hundreds of camera apps, unfortunately many are trival (and specifically the zanny filers I could do without). Yet there is light. There probably is no need to link new cameras back to the three traditional exposure controls, which relate back to the sensitivity of the film, or a diaphragm style aperture control. Even the time taken for the exposure. A simpler set of sliders on a touch screen that corrected over exposure, maybe focus (by just touching the screen where you want it in focus), a slider for depth of field and maybe a drop down set of buttons for specific modes like fast action close up all on the phones touch screen (or on the back of the camera) and the changes can been seen on the screen straight away, This doesn’t sound like much but I bet that would become a popular camera app or even an actual camera.
3. I suspect this will be the year of the photobook, Ok the term has changed a lot some time ago, not so long ago actually serious photographers had exhibitions and very occasionally a publisher might hang the expense and produce a wonderful book of photos, usually with accompanying text but a recognised write, Now the photobook can easily be self published. There are some quiet amazing limited edition photobooks being created today by semi-professionals and gifted amateurs These books have reached a price, mainly due to the technology of the production aspects and old fashion competition where it is can be cheaper to prepare a photobook full of say a hundred or so 5 by 8cm sized snaps of a recent overseas trip compared with getting those snaps printed out individually. The difference is it will probably take some time and energy to create the book and possibly your family will slink away when they see you get the book out, In between there is a place where you can be creative and publish what is important to you. The movement to photobooks is also present in the ebook area where photobooks are starting to gain traction mainly due to the larger screen on IPads and Android tablets. 2014 is a good year to consider creating your first photobook, just start small (in $20-$25 range)

Autofix Revisited

Its been a long time since I looked at autofix features in software, mostly because I consider them a feature or button that takes up valuable screen space. However I had a prompt to revisit this concept after I noticed a nifty light weight app call Color Leap on the google play site (for android phones). Its claims that “true photo enhancement was never so easy.” seemed a bit extravagant and in need of testing. I have noticed cameraphones have particular limitations when they are pointed towards the light, and particular contrasty backlit subjects. They are often hazy,having flared highlights and underexposed detail, they just look flat!  Well Color leap promises to do 4 common enhancement without any user intervention, no buttons with weird names no sliders. promises to remove under and over exposure, fix problems like smoke, haze and dirty lens smears, reduce “colour” noise in low light conditions and even sharpen objects that are “slightly” out of focus. So it was out with my HTC Wildfire and off to get a few examples. I’m sure I could have taken worse photos, but I just wanted to take some realistic examples and I used my phone’s basic camera so I had an original reference photo (you can also take the photo directly in colour leap) I then processed each “on the phone” from the gallery using the color leap app which is truly as simple and automatic as claimed, with the option to view both the original and processed result using a toggle key overlay at the bottom of the screen. I finally loaded the originals onto my computer and used Picasa’s I’m feeling lucky and Lightroom’s Auto White Balance/Auto Tone Combination. So the verdict:  clearly all the Autofixes offer some improvement but as to which is good, better or best is a more objective judgment.

Original	Color Leap	Picasa/Google+	Lightroom

Whilst I actually seldom use the Autofix features of my software I would like to suggest that as you are learning your own style of photo processing it doesn’t hurt to “have a quick look” at these best automatic attempt at “enhancement” and then do better with your own little tweaks. If you are just looking to quickly upload your photos to instagram, twiitter or facebook maybe color leap will get you there without much effort and no manual to read or complex controls to remember.

RAW versus Autofix JPEGs

   
Apart from the obvious lens flare, which version appeals?
There is an original JPEG, and the same Image shot as a RAW. Then two “autofixed” post processed versions derived from the original JPEG. I was actually a little surprised with the results, because I am searching for the best representation of the tonal range of the actal panorama. You might like to compare this with the HDRI study from a few days ago of the rocky cliff on the left hand side of this image
Looking along the TeMata ridge towards Napier

How good are the Auto-Fix Tools?

I guess everyone with a camera knows the disappointment of a great moment that slipped away into a very average photo. The weather was changing to rain and this cormorant turned into the breeze to dry his wings before the rain squall arrived by the time I had fumbled in my camera bag and change my lens the little light left was disappearing fast and I was way to far away anyway, but I hit the shutter button anyway. The result was low key grayness and not quiet what I hoped, but very understandable given the conditions. So maybe it is a worthy candidate to use to compare all those auto-fix tools popping up in most software these days

First I tried out Live Gallery (which is free to download), it doesn't have so many "correction" features but top of the menu of fix tools is the auto adjust. The nice thing is, it does its job quickly but then gives you a set of sliders (which I didn't use) that can enhance the shadows or highlights separately to general brightness and contrast. You can see all this happen in the histogram at the bottom. You can also stretch the tone directly by setting the lightest and darkest tones with the little sliders below the histogram.

Next it used my favourite photo manager Picasa (also free to download). In a very googlesque touch they have called their autofix tool "I'm feeling lucky". I am not sure what exactly the tools does, but in addition to the contrast and tone stretch it also does some colour adjustment. If you want more control you can find the shadow, highlights, contrast and brightness under the Tuning Tab.

Another old favourite or mine is Corel Photo (now incorporated into Jasco Paintshop Pro) it has a no magic single click fix button just lots of option under the image/ adjust section of the menu. The auto equalize does the tone stretching an important part of the auto-fix process. Its definitely old fashioned but does the job.

Next  I moved onto the camera bundled software I got with my cameras. First Olympus Camedia which does have have a auto fix, which gets on and makes a preview that you must accept. There are individual controls in are there in other tools. I also have the Pentax Photo  Browser, which gives a slight versus strong adjustment options under auto image fix. I found I needed the strong adjustment, and perhaps wanted more.

 

Last of all I thought I should try out Paint.Net (also free to download) which is promoting itself as photo editor as well as a paint tool. Like Corel photo its Auto-level just addresses the tone stretch, but there are the other individual brightness, contrast etc controls as well.

So how do the results stack up. Judge for yourself. (move your mouse across the photos below and see which software was used)

I don't think any of these are now wonderful pictures, but they are all "lifted" in different ways, the top four at least did produce a clearer print. I still feel the best place to do your adjustments is in the view finder and dials and/or buttons on your camera.