Auto Tone, Auto Colour and One-Step Photo Fix in Paint by Zaweba

A dull holiday snap rarely needs an hour of careful grading. Most of the time it needs its darkest and brightest tones put back where they belong, a colour cast taken out and a little bite added, and Paint by Zaweba has commands that do exactly that in a single click.

There are four of them, and they sit in the Image menu. Three are the classic automatic corrections, and the fourth, One-Step Photo Fix, rolls several corrections into one pass. Knowing what each one changes helps you pick the right one rather than trying them all in turn.

The three auto commands

Auto Tone (Ctrl+Shift+L) looks at the spread of tones in the picture and stretches them so the image uses the full range from dark to light. A photo that came out grey and foggy because nothing in it reaches true black or true white is the typical case. Because it treats the colour channels as part of that job, it can also shift the colour balance a little.

Auto Contrast (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L) is the gentler sibling. It sets the overall contrast without pulling the channels apart, which makes it the safer choice when the colour already looks right and only the punch is missing. Product shots on a white background and scans of documents often want this one.

Auto Colour (Ctrl+Shift+B) goes after the cast: the orange of indoor bulbs, the blue of shade, the green of old fluorescent tubes. Use it when the brightness looks fine but everything is tinted.

All three work in one click with the last settings you used, so there is no dialog to get through. Press the shortcut, look, and undo if it went too far.

One-Step Photo Fix

One-Step Photo Fix does auto tone, white balance, clarity, sharpening and vibrance together. It is the command to reach for when a photo is a bit wrong in several ways at once, which describes most phone pictures taken in mixed light. Instead of chaining four or five separate adjustments, you get a balanced starting point from one command.

When the result is close but not quite there, Tweak Photo Fix opens the settings behind it, so you can ease off the sharpening on a portrait or hold back the vibrance on skin. Once you have settings you like, the one-click version uses them next time, which is handy when you have a run of pictures from the same camera and the same light.

Getting good results

Work on a copy of the layer, or make sure the original is safe in history, before you run any automatic command. That way you can compare before and after, and if you only want part of the effect you can lower the copy's opacity and let some of the original through.

Automatic commands judge the whole frame. A picture with a big area of sky, snow or black background can fool them, because that area dominates the statistics. If Auto Tone makes a snow scene grey, the command has done what it was told; switch to Auto Contrast or make the correction by hand with Levels or Curves.

Don't stack them blindly. Running Auto Tone and then One-Step Photo Fix applies tone correction twice, which can clip highlights and push colour too far. Pick one route, then fine tune.

Keep an eye on skin. Auto Colour can neutralise warmth that you actually wanted, such as the glow of a sunset on a face. If people look cold afterwards, undo and correct the cast by hand, or use Tweak Photo Fix with less white balance.

Where they fit in the app

Think of these commands as first aid. They get a batch of family photos or product shots from poor to presentable fast, and for many pictures that is the end of the job. For pictures that matter more, use them to find a starting point and then carry on with the finer tools: Clarity and Texture for local contrast, Haze Removal for distant views, adjustment layers when you want edits you can come back to, and the RAW Developer if you shot in RAW and want to work from the original sensor data.

Because the auto commands remember their last settings, they also suit repetitive work. Correct the first image from a shoot by hand in Tweak Photo Fix, then use the one-click command on the rest.

The quickest habit to build is simple: open the photo, press Ctrl+Shift+L, and judge. If it looks better, you have saved yourself several minutes. If it doesn't, one undo puts everything back.