(Most people probably know this, but I only just discovered it. It's probably part of that camera Raw 101 course I skipped because I was out looking at birds. Or asleep. Or both.)
Granted, Adobe's AUTO settings are generally horrible. But sometimes they are handy.
Today I spent ten minutes trying to take pictures of Welcome Swallows on the wing. (For non-birdy people, this is the avian photographic equivalent of trying to invent a carburetor which will allow your car to run on water.) We all do it from time to time and, if we are nice people, we wash our hands carefully afterwards and don't mention it to Granny.)
So I took several hundred shots, giving the new 7D II a real workout, and stupidly under-exposed the whole lot. (I'm not used to the 7D II yet. For some reason known only to Canon and possibly God, they have stuffed around with the image review system such that I haven't yet worked out how to make it go properly. OK, OK, I should RTFM, but I've owned close to a dozen Canon DSLRs so I shouldn't need to read the damn manual just to review an image.) Anyway, they are all under-exposed by maybe a couple of stops - i.e., rescuable with a careful raw conversion, but too dark to judge which of them (if any) is worth the bother.
This is where Adobe's AUTO exposure settings come in. They won't produce very usable images, of course, but I only need them to be good enough to decide which ones (if any) are worth doing properly.
First I culled out the obvious duds - ones I could pick just from the silhouette. That left 114 possibles to convert. I looked up how to do it, and only two usable methods emerged from a remarkably thin Google result set. (a) Use Lightroom. (I'd rather spend six hours driving back to Peterborough and return plus ten minutes taking another set of pictures. Easier and more pleasant all round.) Or (b) muck about creating custom Photoshop actions. No thanks.
Well, what if I just do a few manually? (Open, hit AUTO, save, close.) That works. Takes forever though.
Will Photoshop crash out if I open the whole lot at once? For a wonder, no. It chugs for a while - it's 2.5GB worth of images after all - but accepts the task. Now you can just select each one and hit AUTO.
Better yet, it turns out that inside Camera Raw you can select ALL open files, hit AUTO once and it does an individual auto setting for each of the 114 open files. Then hit save, and maybe five minutes later, the job is done.
Quite possibly, people who only shoot raw and convert all their raw images as routine know all this stuff backwards. (It's new to me as I have never wanted to do more than one conversion at a time before.) In that case I've just wasted 30 seconds of your time and senselessly murdered another couple of billion electrons posting this. Sorry.
(Oh, and after all this, are the swallow pictures any good? Dunno. I haven't looked yet. Probably not. Swallows in flight is a fool's game.)