Simple Camera Raw trick I just discovered

[Tannin]

That's one thing I fairly often find the auto settings useful for, Hamster. Sometimes when I'm a bit lost with what to do with a conversion, I flick the auto on and pay attention to what it thinks is a good idea. Usually, it's doing most of the right things but way too much of them, and by fixing some things wrong with the image (albeit at the cost of messing other stuff that was OK to start with up) it gives me some hints. For example, auto might add a lot to the whites, blacken the shadows, and increase the overall exposure. The result as-is is often pretty yuck, but all of a sudden I can see (say) that my problem is that I need more punch in the whites without changing the darker tones, so I go back to scratch and do my own thing but add extra lift to the whites and get a good result. (A dark room wizard wouldn't need hints, but a dark room wizard I ain't.)

[martycon]

Tony thanks for an interesting and discursive thread and discussion. I made the same suprising discovery only a few weeks ago. I now do a batch auto as a starting point to any similar group of images.
cheers marty

[Hamster]

That's one thing I fairly often find the auto settings useful for, Hamster. Sometimes when I'm a bit lost with what to do with a conversion, I flick the auto on and pay attention to what it thinks is a good idea. Usually, it's doing most of the right things but way too much of them, and by fixing some things wrong with the image (albeit at the cost of messing other stuff that was OK to start with up) it gives me some hints. For example, auto might add a lot to the whites, blacken the shadows, and increase the overall exposure. The result as-is is often pretty yuck, but all of a sudden I can see (say) that my problem is that I need more punch in the whites without changing the darker tones, so I go back to scratch and do my own thing but add extra lift to the whites and get a good result. (A dark room wizard wouldn't need hints, but a dark room wizard I ain't.)

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, that describes it very well.