Consistent exposure plugin

Hello,

 

Just wondering if there is a plugin that can take a control image, read it's exposure (let's say; of the dress or a particular colour), and then

ensure every image in the collection exposes the dress (or the chosen color) at exactly the same brightness? If not there should be to

shorten the workflow when trying to ensure consistent exposure within a series.

 

I spend up to 8 hours in post trying to make sure all the images are consistent before doing my stylising. Surely there's an easier was

because we all know that no matter how hard you try getting perfect exposures all day is not possible.

 

Cheers

Miranda

<p>1) Most program have an "auto" exposure adjustment, although I don't use it!<br>

2) An auto levels adjustment would be a close 2nd in the "auto" department.<br>

3) The problem with 1 & 2 will be consistency.<br>

4) Using something like Lightroom or Aperture means you can adjust the first image in the bunch and then apply that same adjustment to the rest of the series.<br>

5) If you are spending 8-hours adjusting exposure, I might suggest taking the 30-seconds or so to make sure you have the proper exposure in the field. While I agree that not every image is going to be perfect, spending 8-hours adjusting the exposure means none of the images are perfect.</p>

<p>The closest thing to that is using your white balance picker on the dress in each shot. to check the color and brightness and adjust it to where you want. there are plugins that kind of do what you want but if you want the level of precision i think you do, you will spend 5 - 6 hours doing the same process because there is no substitute for our brains.</p>

Well I don't use auto settings on the cameras. Canon cameras. My friend that often shoots with National Geo. uses Nikons and he also avoids auto settings. He just got that new Nikon with the35 megapixal sensor. Has nothing to do with your questions, but I had to remark that he's really happy. It's surely medium format quality, maybe close to large format. Very cool.

 

On my cameras I set the lighting myself, the color lighting. For example the word I'm referring to is called kelvin lighting. You can read up on it. It's actually really interesting.

 

Click here: Digital Photography 1 on 1: Episode 13: White Balance: Adorama Photography TV

 

A wedding dress can be white, yellow, green, blue, and other scary colors. This comes from different light sources. the assorted colors will be slightly off; not a hard green just a tint.

 

This is pretty easy here. Light sources are kind of simple. You have the sun, a flash, shade and different types of light bulbs. Lightbulbs are the scary ones. Colors can be all over the place, because you may run into a standard light bulb to fluorescent, then there are candle lights. I will solve this problem for you!

 

First off when you feel as though you are in trouble use your flash. For beginners, their first wedding, if they use their flash all day and all night, the colors will look really good! The flash is rated around 5600 using the kelvin light rating. You can use the flash for the shade, everything! It's always around 5600. Yes flash units vary, but not by much. Mine are rated by one company at 6100, the other unit is 5200 (kelvin light ratings) From using photoshop I feel 5600 is good for my work. However, anything between 5000 and 6000 kelvin will result with that perfect white dress.

 

On your camera if you decide to use flash most of the time and you are outside, set the camera for flash or sunny. If you are in the shade, first meter the camera for shade, such as ISO 100, F 5.6, the shutter speed at 125th of a second, is usually the shade rating. Go manual here. Now just set the flash to AUTO and the brides dress will be white!

 

 

 

If you are at the reception set the camera setting to flash. Don't use shade, or any of the other settings, for sure don't set it to auto white balance. The flash is much more powerful then any of the lights, or lightbulbs, even worse the DJ strobes balls with 50 different assorted colors spinning around. The AUTO settings won't work.

 

It's really easy to keep life simple. At the receptions I'm liking the ISO settings around 800, F-5.6 and 60th of a second. If you are really close to the people, perhaps 3 feet away, change to F8, or even F11.

 

I have other strobes firing around the room so everything looks even and there aren't dark areas. Everything is pretty much set to f 5.6. You can also email me about lighting up receptions, including outside evening setup's.

 

There's only one RULE! Thats it! ---------Remember, when you are unsure use your flash. Set your kelvin lighting to FLASH! Even if it's sunny, rainy, dark, you wear glasses, your camera is a pentax to that new Nikon - use the flash. The bride and groom will love you.

 

You know whats cool is when you are shooting outside and their eyes are really dark, to the point where you can't tell if they have blue eyes or black eyes and the sockets are black. A flash will pop out these dark eye sockets and you will have such perfect portraits. The eyes will pop out just wonderfully. The flash will really and wonderfully pop. The eyes will look so good.

 

You need to trust yourself and your camera and avoid the word AUTO. I think of this as an auto-matic mistake.

<p>For the modern digital photographer, hours and hours in post are a requirement - if you want consistent, controlled, results. Same as hours in the darkroom, developing <em>and</em> printing used to be. </p>

<p>Even if such a plugin existed, all it would be able to do is read your exif data, and your chosen color correction (or modified exposure settings) and apply it to all your images. 'auto-improve' features in PS, and DPP do essentially that, but of course it can't expose for <em>the dress</em>. It has no way to subjectively analyze the image to determine what you<em> want</em> exposed 'properly', and since the framing, exposure, color balance, camera settings, and lighting <em>all</em> vary from image to image to a lesser or greater degree.</p>

<p>OTOH, I believe there are service providers you can pay to do this for you. You FTP the images off to India, and they come back all 'perfect' (in somebody <em>else's</em> eyes). Then you can play with them to your heart's content.</p>

<p>There are two shooting controls that can help get exposures and color more consistent prior to post processing.</p>

<p>One is learning to use the manual white balance on your camera. The second is learning how to read a histogram on your camera.</p>

<p>For post processing use the correct camera profile. In Lightroom you can also segregate shots by lens used, and then apply software corrections to all of them at once in batch mode. </p>

<p>You can also create user plug-ins for frequent corrections and apply those at will.</p>

<p>The reason so much time is spent in post processing with digital is that we are looking at images on the screen and adjusting them individually. In the case of prints, exposures and color temp can be off, but the lab techs and lab scanning machines adjust for color and density. That usually works reasonably well ... but I know of no equivalent plug-in to do the same thing. </p>

<p><em>Side note to Bob ... no disrespect, but the Nikon D800 is hardly Medium format quality, and most certainly not Large format quality ... a notion that friends who have both MFD and the D800 or D800E have shared with me. It is nice that there is such a high resolution 35mm DSLR camera, but it really requires meticulous technique to realize that resolution otherwise it may as well be a 18 meg camera ... and many Nikon lenses are simply not up to the sensor ... which even Nikon warns about. Personally, I think there are better choices for a wedding camera. </em></p>

<p> </p>

Marc, no disrespect taken. I actually have to thank you for taking the time to write. So Thanks! It was a very good response, which I was unaware of and I'm always into learning.

<blockquote>

<p><em>but the Nikon D800 is hardly Medium format quality</em><br>

<em> </em></p>

</blockquote>

<p><em><br /></em>I think that all depends. It certainly surpasses many MFD cameras. Obviously, in resolution it is better than some. And in dynamic range as well. Does a DSLR have the aesthetic of a MFD, no. I have only worked with a few files from a D800 and they are a pure joy. I have a D600 and those are very nice files as well, but the D800 certainly has that extra edge. As to whether it's the best choice for shooting weddings, well there are just too many dynamics involved to say yes or no. But if you are a Nikon shooter, it is certainly a very, very, good choice. The D4 might be a better choice but the $3000 difference buys a lot of lens(es)!</p>

<p>Just in case the OP mis-phrased the question (sometimes it happens), want to throw in the "image>adjustments>match color" command in Photoshop.</p>

<p>I used to use one of the touch strips on my wacom tablet to adjust exposure while hovering over the image with the pen set to show RGB values. It was Capture One raw converter and unfortunately it couldn't show Lab values which would be best. L in Lab stands for lightness (same as brightness for the human eye) so then you have only one value for brightness instead of three as you do with RGB. Photoshop can show Lab values when hovering over the image but not suitable for volume work. Don't know what you can do in LR nowadays, it has never been my tool of choice.</p>

<p>Anyway the key to minimize post work is to shoot consistent exposures. It's better to shoot in manual mode and have 40 images where all the 40 images have their exposure slightly off but the same, compared to having 40 images where the exposure will be different for each image.</p>

<p>I also find it faster to go over the images several times with a different goal each time. So I would batch correct white balance first for all images, fine tune exposures on one run, fine tune white balance on the next run etc. When you do this you can put up a reference image on the screen and then do the correction. It'll keep your eyes "calibrated".</p>

<p>You also need to have whatever software you are using to be very fast in switching between images. When you flick through your images fast it's easy to see differences in exposures, colors etc. With fast I mean several images per second. If you use slow software you need fast hardware to compensate.</p>

<p>Ideally raw software should have an exposure picker just like they have a WB picker. Both should be able to be biased. For instance that whatever you click on sets the exposure to 90% or the white balance slightly warm. Unfortunately I know of no raw converter that can do that and I don't know of any plugin or similar that could help.</p>

<p> </p>

<blockquote>

<p>I spend up to 8 hours in post trying to make sure all the images are consistent before doing my stylising.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I must ask, what exactly is your workflow BEFORE you take the shot? What are the settings in-camera that are causing you to have to spend that much time on correcting exposure after the fact? If you can answer that, it will help in providing the appropriate responses...</p>

<p>Mark, say he chewed through 1000 images in 8 hours. Suppose, for each image, he did nothing except:<br>

open the image,<br>

look it over,<br>

possibly do a preliminary crop<br>

and, if necessary, tweak the exposure and other basic controls in LR,<br>

export it as a TIF or PSD for possible future work in PS,<br>

then move on to the next image.</p>

<p>That works out to 28.8 seconds per image. To me, that's moving along at a *very* good pace. I'm not sure that nailing the exposure in-camera would save very much PP time.</p>

<p>What do you have in mind?</p>

<p>Tom M</p>

<blockquote>

<p>One is learning to use the manual white balance on your camera.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Why bother setting white balance? It is just one more setting that has to be fooled with under changing light conditions. To get it spot on takes time using some sort of target or the lid from a can of chips. I prefer to use RAW format and just keep the camera white balance on daylight. The white balance setting in the camera only affects the JPG preview on the camera and provides a starting point for the RAW developer software. Other than that the white balance is ignored by the camera for the RAW format.</p>

<p>The only possible advantage is that the histogram may be slightly more accurate. But not enough to matter with the latitude you get with RAW images. The less I have to worry about when taking images the less complicated the entire process becomes.</p>

<p>@ Tom, while I don't want to answer for Mark, I would say that the point is that you should not have to edit every image, regardless of the time it takes you to edit that image. So no. 30 seconds/image isn't bad at all. What's bad is that assumes <em>every</em> image needs some sort of tweak.</p>

<p>@ Raymond, to each their own. I would much rather try to have the correct white-balance prior to pressing the shutter button. No, it isn't always possible, but it also isn't that difficult to use something like a ColorRight or ExposDisc (or Pringles cap, although I don't know how much light is transmitted with a Pringles cap!). However, I would simply set my white-balance to daylight either. If in doubt, I will use AWB. Using daylight WB almost guarantees the wrong WB unless shooting in daylight (where AWB works well anyway). But inside a church or reception hall shooting daylight WB? Not me!</p>

<blockquote>

<p><a href="../photodb/user?user_id=5233527">John Deerfield</a> , Dec 18, 2012; 11:22 a.m. scribed: "@ Raymond, to each their own. I would much rather try to have the correct white-balance prior to pressing the shutter button."</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I very much agree with that statement. To each their own. Find what works for you then run with it. There is no perfect way for everyone.</p>

 

<p>Prior WB-in-RAW discussion: http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00YJta</p>

<p>Miranda, I understand your suffering. Getting exposure and WB to a tightly consistent level across an entire wedding collection is a huge pain. So I've begun to outsource this work. I upload my RAW files to my editor, and in a week or so, I get a LR4 catalog back (they can do other formats, sidecars, etc.) with exposure, white balance, and cropping edits done, and with greater consistency than I usually reach when trying to do it myself. </p>

<p>I then do my final polishing and stylistic edits. Taking the dull, technical part of editing out of my workflow has been a big blessing. For the most part, achieving <em><strong>consistency</strong> </em>in WB and exposure is not a matter of artistic judgment (some exposure decisions are, but usually that's as much in camera as in post). In fact, outsourcing has improved my stylistic results by giving me a level starting point when I begin my post work. </p>

<p>Next time, try to religiously use a grey card and custom white balance. It takes about 30 seconds... and I bet you shave hours off your post production.</p>

<p><br /><br /> </p>

<p> </p>