LIghtroom Auto Tone Too Dark and Loses Detail

Question

Hi,
I'm new to Lightroom so excuse my ignorance if I use the wrong terminology or ask a question that has a relatively easy answer I somehow overlooked inside of Lightroom.
I take photos at my son's soccer games and frequently walk away with over 200 photos to adjust, crop, etc. after removing the poor composition, out of focus and other shots. One of the features that prompted me to purchase Lightroom to replace my existing tool (Capture One LE) was the way Lightroom handled colors in the Auto Tone preset. Photos auto adjusted in Lightroom with the Auto Tone feature exhibit a much more rich/vibrant color than the ones that would come out of Capture One LE for me.
However, I've noticed that Auto Tone also darkens areas of the photo to the point where a significant amount of detail is lost. For example, a shot of a player head on with a shadow across his face and front of his jersey loses facial detail around the eyes, nose, mouth and folds in the front of the jersey because the coloring is darkened to the point where the highlights are lost.
I've tried several adjustments to regain the highlights and associated detail, but am unsure if there's a better way to recover the detail (or gain the tone enhancements without losing the detail). So far, the adjustments I've tried to regain the detail have caused the colors to wash out somewhat and reduce the benefit gained with the color enhancements of Auto Tone.
Is there a better way of regaining the detail after using Auto Tone? And on a related note, is there a way to "undo" just the Auto Tone adjustment in a photo if it's not the last adjustment made, or does one need to step backward through the adjusments undoing each adjustment in order to get to the Auto Tone adjustment in order to remove it?
Thanks in advance for any direction or suggestions anyone can provide. FYI, my photos were all in RAW format (noticed a lot of other posts referring to LR Auto Tone washing out JPGs, but this isn't my issue), with a Canon 20D.
Dale

Answer 1

There are several ways to go, here, as always with Lightroom in this situation. I suppose one thing you can do is use Auto Tone as you've been doing, and then back down another slider or two, particularly Contrast and Brightness, that moves too far for your taste when you hit Auto Tone.
I don't use Auto Tone. It's considered a machete where deftly-wielded surgical knives get much better results. I tested Auto Tone out on a virtual copy of one of my photos of people for you to see what happens. It bumps Contrast way up, drops Brightness a bit, reduces Fill Light, and increases Blacks slightly. Yeah, that would pretty much get the results you're complaining about! Might work okay in some landscape shots in some very subdued lighting situations, but it will make family shots too harsh.
Let me suggest another approach. First, no one checklist approach like I'm about to suggest works for every photo. But when you learn how to use the sliders yourself, and not rely on the automatic and strongest ones, like Auto Tone and Contrast, your photos will look better than you even realized. Seriously! I know what you're saying:
I take 200 photos at a time, and I don't have time to play with sliders for each photo. Hear me out, though, because you do. Once you get the hang of it, you'll learn to do all this so fast, well less than one minute per keeper shot, and you'll see that it's worth the small amount of time it takes.
First look at all your Imported shots and quickly weed out most of them. Don't try to save the ones where your main subject is out-of-focus or turned away at the last second, or badly overexposed shots, or for whatever reason, aren't worth editing time because you know you have better ones... and you should weed out MOST shots (maybe at least 150) if you took 200! Be a tough editor! Hit the X key as you look at ones to cull, then click Filter by black flag until all the Rejected photos Only are isolated, check them one more time to be sure you didn't X some you want by mistake, ctrl-A them to highlight all the Rejected ones ONLY, and hit Delete to blow them all away, From Disk. Congratulate yourself, because you just saved a lot of editing time.
Assuming the Exposure was in the right ballpark, fix Color Temp first. For your first keeper shot, move that Temp slider near upper right of Develop, almost certainly to the right for Canon Raw shots, to warm the faces a bit. You probably don't want the kids' faces ruddy red, but a little warming so that white jerseys just begin to go slightly to the red side of white, makes your outdoor people photos glow. It wouldn't be surprising to see family soccer photos in the 6000-6500 range look best. If you want cold journalistic realism, leave white jerseys pure white and Temp down in the 4000-5000 range on a cloudy day or 5000-6000 range on a sunny one. Now, if one shot's right, and
if your light didn't change during the shoot (sun going in and out of clouds, sun setting, field lights turning on halfway through the game), you can fix Temp for all your remaining shots with just a couple of clicks! Leave the first shot you fixed Temp for highlighted, and ctrl-A the whole filmstrip (or, alternatively, you can just ctrl-click the ones taken in the same light). Now click the Sync button that appears near the lower right corner of Develop. A window pops. Make sure White Balance is checked, and click Synchronize. (Every field checked here gets applied the same as on the first highlighted shot to all your subsequently highlighted shots when you do this. Since you haven't changed anything else yet, you don't have to uncheck the other boxes-- it won't matter. But later, after you've made other adjustments to other shots, you might only want to leave the boxes checked for fields you do want applied the same to all highlighted photos.) When you click Synchronize, watch all the highlighted photos in the filmstrip at the bottom get a warmer color balance. You can always later make more refined adjustments to individual shots or groups of shots that go too red or not warm enough.
The next thing to fix is the Exposure. Get in the habit of constantly consulting that Histogram graph at the top of the right column. Ideally, though this isn't always possible or ideal, but generally, you'd like to see neither triangle in the upper right and left corners
lit. (When it's right, you'll still see the outline of the triangle, but it won't be illuminated.) Even better, for an average outdoor shot with a variety of light and dark tones, you want to see a nice balanced line across most of the graph, curving up from the left and down on the right. Not always possible or the best exposure for every shot, mind you, just average ones. (A silhouette shot on a beach with the setting sun in the photo is an example of a shot where the best Histogram will look the opposite of that!) Try moving Exposure slowly to the left and right and watch how the Histogram moves. Try to get the best average placement you can, and see if the photo still looks right.
Or watch your grass with soccer shots while you move Exposure back and forth. Grass should look middle green, not too bright, and not dull-muddy-dark. Or watch faces. If you still have a triangle on the upper right of Histogram, which means highlight detail is blowing out, try sliding Recovery to the right just until the upper right triangle disappears, if possible. (It isn't always possible, even with Recovery at 100.) If you still have a triangle on the upper left of Histogram (that one means shadows are muddy with no detail), try sliding Blacks down from 5 towards 0, just until the triangle goes away. Sometimes it's easier to make a triangle go away by moving Exposure a bit. If there's no triangle on the upper left, try increasing Black slowly just until one appears in the upper left, then back off a bit until it just goes away again. If there are harsh shadows, increase Fill Light to brighten shadows a bit until it looks right. Losing the triangles is a general goal but not as important as having photos look right to you. It's a juggling act. Sometimes when you remove the triangles, the grass is muddy brownish, faces look wrong, or highlights are too dull. Maybe you move Exposure, Highlights or Blacks to put one or both triangles back but leave the overall photo better.
Now just do two more things, especially as you're learning this: first, increase Clarity. Probably a bunch. If faces go too harsh on you with Clarity at a highsetting, and they can in closeup, you may want about a 20-45 on Clarity. Many photos look best with even higher Clarity settings, even 100 for landscapes. Now bump Vibrance up, probably to the left of the Clarity slider, though. Too high a setting on Vibrance makes colors looks cartoonish and fake. Are faces too ruddy or foliage too over-the-top? Back off on Vibrance.
Look at the Histogram one more time and touch up Recovery and Blacks again if needed to get rid of barely reappearing triangles.
I recommend you do not move the following sliders, generally, for 99% of your photos, anyway: Tint (just usually not needed if the camera is doing color balance correctly), and Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation, all of which are ham-handed ways of doing what you do more precisely with the other sliders. About the only time you need Saturation is to move it left with a rare shot that for some reason has too much color especially red even with Vibrance set to 0. (Maybe your camera is set to Vivid.)
Doing these things will make most of your photos look WAY better than hitting Auto Tone. And once you get the hang of it, as I said, you can do each photo in well less than one minute, and you only do this on your keepers, so it doesn't take much time.