Sample 3 (Cemetery Hill, Taiwan)
I made this pano of a cemetery in the mountains north of Taipei on a wet, windy day. The version with my manual adjustments actually represents an interim stage of post-processing, which included a subsequent round-trip to Photoshop. However, I thought that, even unfinished, this might be an interesting counterpoint to the San Miguel sample because the overcast conditions were almost exactly the opposite of the bright sunlight that afternoon in Mexico. The Auto-adjusted version is quite a bit drearier than the one with my manual adjustments, with slightly reduced Exposure and Shadows settings, greatly reduced Contrast and Highlights settings, and added Vibrance and Saturation.
Sample 4 (Riverbank in Kyoto)
I had to blow some highlights in this night shot from the Sanjo Dori bridge in Kyoto in order to capture the detail on the riverbank below. The manually-processed image required several local adjustments. These are reflected in the pasted settings. I was curious to see what the Auto control would do with the overall tones of a file that had been subjected to multiple local adjustments. I don't think it was thrown off by them at all. The version processed with the Auto control isn't a very good representation of the scene that was in front of me that night, but it's not a preposterous rendering, either.
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Again, I don't consider this to represent a rigorous test of the new Auto control. I can't even say how much better it is than the old version of the control, which I think I tried a few times but never seriously used. And I haven't come to any conclusions about whether I'm going to try using the Auto control as a starting point for post-processing in the future. But it does strike me as an interesting and perhaps useful choice for the introduction of an "artificially intelligent" tool to a product whose greatest strength has always been the amount of manual control it offers the photographer.