It’s the most basic tool ever, and Lightroom doesn’t have it: Levels and Auto Levels

So yes, Lightroom does have a Tone Curve panel which kind of does the same thing as levels adjustments, but you have to drag the black point and white point control points manually for each image – there’s no auto option. And yes, you can use Lightroom’s Auto tone adjustments, but these adjust eight different sliders at once, which is equally annoying. It’s why I keep going back to Capture One.

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Why Levels and Auto Levels are so useful

Levels are one of the most basic image adjustments. You use levels to expand the tonal range of the image from a solid black to a brilliant white. It’s a quick and simple way to restore proper contrast to flat-looking images.

But levels adjustments can do much more than that. They don’t just let you adjust the overall brighntess values, they let you adjust the red, green and blue channels individually. You probably wouldn’t do that manually unless you wanted to introduce color shifts, but if your software supports auto levels, you can set it up to work not just on brightness values alone but on the individual channels instead. When you use auto levels on the image’s RGB channels you can very effectively restore neutral colors to images with a color cast, at the same time as achieving a full tonal range.

Photoshop has levels and auto levels, but Lightroom does not. You can do levels-style adjustments in the Tone Curve panel but there’s no equivalent of auto levels. You have to examine the histogram and adjust each image manually. That’s annoying for what is to me an adjustment I use all the time.

So what’s wrong with Lightroom’s Auto Tone?

Auto Tone usually does quite a good job of bringing images to life, but it uses a whole bunch of sliders to do it, namely Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, Vibrance, Saturation. There’s no option to select just some of these adjustments – it’s all or nothing. Worse than that, there’s too much interaction between the Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks sliders as they mix together black point and white point adjustments, shadow and highlight recovery, exposure and contrast. You can’t just reset the sliders you don’t want because they all rely on each other for the overall effect.

What I ACTUALLY want is a simple auto levels option, one of the most basic of all image adjustments, in my opinion, but completely missing from Lightroom.

How Capture One does it

Capture One has both a Levels and a Curve panel. If all you want is a simple levels adjustment you don’t need to wrestle with tone curves to get it. What’s more, Capture One has a simple Auto Levels feature to automatically adjust the black and white points of the image to maximize its tonal range. And, if you want to, you can configure this to work on the individual RGB channels so that you get a color correction at the same time.

What about Auto Tone adjustments? Capture One has these too and, as with Lightroom, these adjust a series of settings at the same time, notably White Balance, Exposure, Contrast, Brightness, Shadows, Highlights, Levels. The difference is, though, that in Capture One you can decide which of the settings you want it to adjust. If you want it to leave the white balance alone, simply un-check that option – or any others you don’t want it to apply.

That, if you ask me, is how it should be done.