Where or how to learn blending photos together?

I'm seeking links to tutorials or helpful tricks to solve the following problem:

Imagine a bunch of pictures, each of them looking "acceptable" on its own, maybe taken by different people or using various cameras.

How to homogenize them, so they look similar next to each other, illustrating the same page or wall?

Are there other ways than eyeballing to analyze what the difference between them might be? Any short cuts besides using a color chart and dedicated software? - Does the color chart approach work for you when you use multiple systems?

Thanks in advance

Have 10,000 photos to edit? Here’s how to breeze through them ?

Thanks for the link Sandy.

My challenge is more like: A dozen corporate headshots, 3 of them way too K-heavy to blend in

Or: Entirely different contrast levels in 3 pictures to end on the same page.

I'd love to read or watch tutorials how to deal with such situations, if necessary even by hand.

You could try using "auto tone", "auto contrast", and "auto color" on each image in Photoshop. That might at least get you closer to your goal.

Have the pictures been taken against plain backgrounds, perhaps of different colours? In which case it's possible to select the background using the magic wand or smart selection tool in Photoshop, Then replace it with a uniform colour. Or reverse the selection, and copy the actual head shots onto a larger canvas and arrange them to suit. If the colours still look wrong then it's a case of adjusting them individually.

IMO the Mk1 eyeball is the gold standard. If two or more pictures look right under the same lighting, then they are right.

 

You can use the dropper tool or auto levels to set same or similar black and white points, but what happens in between is difficult to quantify and automate. There's no such thing as a standard skin tone, for example.

 

Manual use of the curves tool is probably your best friend in matching tonality between different images. That and a good eye for colour casts/white balance.

 

Depending on time/budget/logistic constraints - might it not be better to re-shoot the headshots using a standardised setup?

Edited August 2, 2018 by rodeo_joe|1