[originalwinger]

Hi, looking for help or suggestions to a problem I have not been able to solve. I shoot RAW with a K3 and PP with Faststone of which gives me great results by using Colours-colours auto-adjust colours and a bit of sharpening. This works well if I only have a few shots to do, but when I have 40-60 it becomes a long process. In batch convert the auto-adjust colours is not available and I have not been able to clone it in the Batch convert Advanced Ajustments options I should mention I have used CS6 for batch adjustments but was not happy with the reults. Am I missing something.

[rawr]

It looks to me like Colors > Auto-Adjust Colors isn't available for batch operations in FastStone.

And you can't do it just by selecting a bunch of images directly from a folder either. Browsing an image folder, I tried applying auto-adjust to three images (select 3 images, then go Colors > Auto-Adjust Colors). The result was horrible. FastStone seemed to average out the colours from all three images and apply that to the auto-adjust result. And it only seemed to work on the last image in the series too.

For what it's worth, other freeware image viewers/editors I like (eg IrfanView and XnView) do offer colour auto-adjust as a batch operation, if that is important to you.

[originalwinger]

It looks to me like Colors > Auto-Adjust Colors isn't available for batch operations in FastStone.

And you can't do it just by selecting a bunch of images directly from a folder either. Browsing an image folder, I tried applying auto-adjust to three images (select 3 images, then go Colors > Auto-Adjust Colors). The result was horrible. FastStone seemed to average out the colours from all three images and apply that to the auto-adjust result. And it only seemed to work on the last image in the series too.

For what it's worth, other freeware image viewers/editors I like (eg IrfanView and XnView) do offer colour auto-adjust as a batch operation, if that is important to you.

Thanks rawr, those were my findings also, i will take a look at those two and see what I come up with. The reason colour auto adjust is important to me is it is quick, easy and gives me what I like 90% of the time. I wish I could figure out how to get good auto results from CS6.

[tibbitts]

Auto-adjust in faststone always blows out highlights for me. Am I the only one with that problem?

[originalwinger]

Auto-adjust in faststone always blows out highlights for me. Am I the only one with that problem?

After seeing your post I took 2 random DNG K3 files and put them through Faststone and Photoshop CS6 auto processing function. I then opened the saved jpegs in Silkypix to see what the blinkies indicated. The results were CS6 more over exposed than Fastone which brought the highlights out but not way overexposed. Are we seeing different things due to the different cameras ?

[tibbitts]

After seeing your post I took 2 random DNG K3 files and put them through Faststone and Photoshop CS6 auto processing function. I then opened the saved jpegs in Silkypix to see what the blinkies indicated. The results were CS6 more over exposed than Fastone which brought the highlights out but not way overexposed. Are we seeing different things due to the different cameras ?

My photos are all with K100, K200, and K5, if that matters, the latter two DNGs. I don't have cs6. I gave up on auto-colors in Faststone and just use curves and levels and shadow/highlight adjustments now. Also I find that if I don't dial down the raw conversion brightness (to say 50%) I've lost a lot of the highlights before I even begin. I've tried using raw converters first, and some of the do seem to give slightly better results, they're just clunkier to work with. Obviously I'm only saving in 8-bit and typically save as PNG, then eventually convert to JPEG. Sometimes I need to use gimp or other software that can segregate adjustments to highlights/midtones/shadows more than Faststone can, although by far the biggest limitation with faststone is the inability to feather selections. Otherwise it seems to be very powerful.

[arkav]

I'm a big fan of Faststone, but only as a file browser and basic editor. I would not use it as a raw converter, as it's capabilities are rather limited in that respect ( no white balance adjustment, highlight recovery, etc. ). I should add that I have only used FastStone for RAW conversion a handful of times, so I have very little experience using it in this way. Perhaps I'm missing something.

I mostly shoot RAW+JPG these days. I'll often work with the JPG file unless really serious adjustments are required, in which case I will go back to the RAW file and convert it using something like DxO or PDCU. But I call out to these programs from FastStone, as it's full screen viewing and side by side comparison modes are excellent for choosing which images I want to work on.