Sep16

Matching Exposures in Adobe Lightroom 2
Posted by Alan under Misc. Post your comment.
 

I may be a little slow on the uptake here but I have just stumbled upon something in Lightroom 2 that really tickled me, apparently it was in LR v1 but I completely missed it…oh well. It’s called ‘Match Total Exposures’ and can be found in the ‘Settings’ pull down menu while you have more than one image selected in the filmstrip ‘Develop’ menu. The feature seems to be grayed out other wise.

It seems that that the purpose of this function is to account for camera exposure changes between shots in a series. Suppose you’re shooting in AV mode and there are slight changes in shutter speeds, or your in M mode and you change the aperture, shutter speed or ISO to compensate for light changes etc. By selecting one of the images with a visually ‘good’ exposure in a series of shots Lightroom will attempt to match the exposure of the other images in the selection by adjusting the exposure slider in the Develop module.

It’s frighteningly simple idea and seems to work pretty well. More importantly, it’s a major time saver while wading through hundreds of images.

I wonder what other cool things I’ve missed………

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There are 4 Comments posted so far

  1. Tess
    August 29, 2009

    Thanks for posting this - what a time saver!

     
  2. clvrmnky
    March 16, 2010

    Huh. I always forget about that, and end up using the Sync button to sync up exposures. Is this control smarter than that, or is it just a convenience for the same thing?

     
  3. admin
    March 16, 2010

    @clvrmnky - Yes, this control is different than syncing.

    If you have shot all your images in AV/TV mode it looks at the exif data of the shot with ‘correct’ exposure and shifts the exposure slider of all other images to match. Its kind of like if you had shot all images in Manual.

    Alan

     
  4. Mike Nelson Pedde
    March 18, 2010

    Thanks for this! I’ve added you to my Lightroom Links page.

    http://bit.ly/4XuaXE

    Take care,
    Mike.

     

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