auto-levels and sharpen?

I took a friends 10D images with poor contrast and showed him how much
better it could be with just auto-levels and the sharpen command. But even
Elements is overkill for him. Preferably it would have a batch mode to do
this. Maybe he could tweak the sharpness in the 10D if he just had something
to correct for that "hazy" look the Canon files sometimes get. It happens on
my 1D and Rebel, too, and that's when I pinch the levels a bit.

 

You would definitely benefit from shooting RAW if you are doing all that
work. Otherwise the in-camera settings should be adjustable to probably
get as much 'umph' out of the pictures. I couldn't say which RAW
converter might be simple enough, Adobe Camera Raw for CS (probably the
same as elements?) can be given default values to whatever you want. You
only need to change them for unusual pictures.

 

"hazy" look the Canon files sometimes get.

It happens to me only when I use photoshop CS to open the raw files, if I
use a cannon utility like the file viewer or digital photo pro software they
look great. Did u try that? Just for an experiment why don't u open one of
the "hazy" ones with the file viewer and convert it to a tiff and load that
in photoshop and see if there is a difference...?

 

It was bad overcast so he's got bad contrast and color balance from his
JPEG's. He did not shoot RAW. We can't soot again - what is done is done.
Just looking for a tool to correct contrast and color in batch mode.

 

Irfanview will do that for free. It's not as fancy as curves or
auto-levels in photoshop but will do gamma, contrast, sharpening, etc. I
remember hearing of another good program with auto levels type
correction, sorry I can't recall. :-(

Irfanview is worth a shot, maybe sort into groups of under/over exposed
& experiment to get the best settings.

 

http://www.photocleaner.com/

About as simple as it gets. If he can't be bothered to do this...

 

or sorry didn't realize they were jpegs...the solution is to shoot raw next
time