Image enhancement

Automatic image enhancement makes various adjustments to the image data with the aim of improving the appearance of the image. The most important image enhancement steps are exposure correction and colour cast correction, which change the brightness and colour of the entire image. For example, exposure correction is used to brighten underexposed images to reveal more detail. Colour cast correction is used when, for example, an image was taken in artificial light and has a strong yellow cast. Well-exposed images with good white balance will require less correction.

These global corrections are followed by local image adjustments. For example, dark areas and shadows in the image are brightened to make underexposed faces more visible against backlighting. Similarly, very bright areas of the image, such as white clouds, are slightly darkened to improve detail. Local adjustments are also made on a smaller scale to different areas of colour, for example to make the skin tones of different faces appear more pleasing. Finally, the sharpness of an image can also be adjusted slightly depending on the area of the image.

Depending on the image class, other image enhancements can be applied, such as automatic red-eye reduction or noise reduction for high-sensitivity images.

Although many corrections are a matter of personal taste, correcting exposure, colour casts and shadows, for example, will in most cases significantly improve many images that would be unsatisfactory in their original state.

Enable or disable image enhancement?

If you have edited the images yourself in a photo editing application, we recommend that you disable image enhancement. Note that you can deactivate the Image Enhancement by default in the Settings menu. When this option is enabled, Image Enhancement will not be automatically applied to images. However, you can still manually activate it for each image later.
If you have not done any image enhancement and the images are straight from your mobile phone or camera, we always recommend that you enable image enhancement.

Self-created PNGs & transparent PNGs

If you are using PNGs that you have created yourself and inserted into the software and that have transparency, we recommend that you always deactivate image enhancement, otherwise you may end up with unwanted changes to your PNG file.