Auto

[Yvonne]

Lightroom Version Number

Lightroom Classic 8.3.1

Operating System

1. macOS 10.14 Mojave

OK, is there a feature similar to Apple Photos for auto enhance and for auto crop? I really do not want to tinker Thanks.

 

[Califdan]

I don't know how Apple Photos work, but In LR Classic there is an Auto Tone button and you can make a preset to automatically apply Auto Tone on import. It is in the Develop Module in the Basic Panel.

I don't know of any "Auto Crop" feature (and am hard pressed to see how one would work anyway as cropping is really a subjective matter). There is a feature in the Crop tool to help you level images but no "Auto Crop" per se.

 

[Yvonne]

I found the Auto tone and it does what I need. I have not been able to find the Crop tool to see if it will auto level.

 

[Zenon]

If you don't want use Auto at import you can do it with a group of files or all of them in the Develop module. Select a group or all files, switch Sync to Auto Sync and apply Auto. Here is where the crop tool is.

 

[Califdan]

In Zenon's screen shot, click the crop tool (arrow pointing to it). Then select the level icon (the cursor pointer will turn into a level). Now with mouse draw a line in the image over something that should be horizontal (e.g. the horizon) or vertical (e.g. edge of a buiilding) and the image will auto rotate accordingly.

For more sophistication, see the ":Guided" tab in the Transform panel. Here you draw several lines, some vertical and some horizontal (I usually do two vertical and one horizontal for most images containing buildings). This tool will not only rotate the image but will skew it as well. For example if you pointed your camera up to shoot a tall building, the left and right edges of the building will get closer together nearer the top of the building than at the bottom. In other words the two sides will not be parallel. If you drag a line along each edge of the buildiing, this tool will squeeze the bottom of the image to make the edges of the building parallel to each other.

 

[Conrad Chavez]

I don't know of any "Auto Crop" feature (and am hard pressed to see how one would work anyway as cropping is really a subjective matter).

There's definitely no Auto Crop tool in any version of Lightroom that I know of.

But several companies have applied AI/machine learning research to automatic cropping. Because even though cropping is subjective, there are definitely common cultural conventions of composition that drive most cropping decisions to similar solutions. So tech companies have been implementing machine-learning-powered automatic cropping features that either help you suggest reasonably composed crops, or actually commit them to batches of images or video.

Adobe has definitely looked into this. Automatic cropping was a project at Adobe Research. They got it worked out enough to demonstrate automatic cropping of video to multiple aspect ratios at Adobe MAX 2018, and this is apparently now a real feature called Smart Crop in Adobe Experience Manager.

I would not be surprised if auto cropping turns up in Lightroom at some point, to complement Auto Tone, Auto Upright, etc. As with those other features, we can guess that we'll be able to override whatever nondestructive crop it suggests.