I'm posting this and its associated attachments with some hesitation. It does not describe a rigorous test: I was just tinkering with the new "intelligent" Lightroom Auto control to see what it did with a few of my images. However, I thought the results were interesting enough that I decided to make them publicly available—and perhaps prompt others to post some samples of their own.
Methodology: I copied all the settings from a processed raw file except the ones mediated by the new Auto control: Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Saturation, and Vibrance. I then pasted the settings into a virtual copy of the raw file in its original imported state. Finally, I used the new Auto control on the file with the pasted settings. Since the order that adjustments are applied reportedly has no effect on Lightroom's final rendering of the file, the before-and-after pairs in this post and the next one should accurately reflect the difference between how I manually had processed the respective images and the effect of the Auto control.
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Sample 1 (Alebrijes)
The original capture was not optimally exposed. I was making a snapshot of a couple of the Oaxacan alebrijes my wife and I have collected so I could email to some friends a sample of this genre of Mexican folk art, and I didn't bother to modify the camera's auto-exposure setting. Needless to say, because of the white background, the image was significantly underexposed. I dealt with this in post before I sent the email. I thought just maybe the examples slurped up by Adobe's neural network when it was creating the dataset for the Auto control might have allowed the software to recognize that these subjects had a white background, but apparently not.
Sample 2 (San Miguel de Allende Skyline)
This pano was properly exposed at capture time and the lighting was excellent, so I expected the Auto control to do a fairly decent job with it. As Jeff Schewe explained in another thread, "the new Auto is a bit conservative with extreme highlights with a tendency of texture and detail being important. Also, the shadows tend to be fairly open," and that's exactly what I think I see here. My manual adjustments were a bit punchier—there may even be a few blown highlights, although the Lightroom histogram doesn't show them—and I didn't try to recover all the shadow detail in the raw file because that's not the way the light looks on a sunny day in central Mexico. But if I was processing this image for the first time, the Auto settings wouldn't be an unacceptable starting point.
The forum software restricts me to four attachments, so the two final examples will appear in my next post.