Editing a group of pictures with similar results

Hey guys, When editing a group of pictures, how do you guys go about keeping the edits within that group similar? I use actions, and have a hard time getting this pictures to have the same "look". Do you guys right down exactly what actions were applied, at what opacity? Or is there some way to automate actions across an entire group of pictures to make it easier?

I edit the first one, then keep it open as I edit subsequent ones, and use it as a visual guide. It works ok.

There's numerous ways to approach what you are asking about, depending on what you need to accomplish.

If you want, you can run images in and out of Photoshop using Bridge and the Image Processor function, or you can use the Photoshop Batch Processor from inside the editor -- load a set of images into Photoshop and run them through your action(s) using the Batch processor then you can check on them individually, fine-tuning them as you go.

There are many online resources for how all this can work. Check out this Google page for "photoshop batch process":

http://www.google.com …urceid=ie7&rlz=​1I7ADRA_en

ACR also has a couple convenient ways to batch process global adjstments and is worth checking out -- it handles jpegs and tiffs as well as Raw files and is pretty powerful for many tasks that don't require selective operations needing layers (ACR also has local adjustment brushes but we're talking batch processing here).

Shoot manual, raw, and work in your raw converter in a batch. The rest is eyeballing it.

Automating actions will not give you consistent images....you first need to start with relatively similar exposures. Shoot in raw with your camera and flash in Manual mode. (assuming your flash is off-camera; with camera mounted flash use Manual camera and TTL flash).

Then use an application like Lightroom to create similar exposures. Lightroom has a function named "Match Total Exposure" that will do all the work for you instead of guessing at consistency.

Here's how Martin Evening describes the Match Total Exposure function in his book "The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers"

"You can use this command to match the exposure across a series of images that have been selected via the Filmstrip. Match Total Exposures calculates a match value by analyzing and combining the shutter speed, lens aperture, the ISO speed the photos were captured at, plus any camera-set exposure compensation. It then factors in all these camera-set values, combines them with the desired exposure value (as set in the most selected image), and calculates new Lightroom exposure values for all the other selected images. I find that this technique can often be used to help average out the exposure brightness in a series of photos where the light values were going up and down during a shoot, which is probably why the chief Lightroom architect Mark Hamburg also likes to describe this as a a “de-bracketing” command. So in effect, if you highlight an individual image in the series and select Match Total Exposures, the other images in that selection automatically balance to match the exposure of the target image."

NChaparro wrote in post #11651500
Hey guys, When editing a group of pictures, how do you guys go about keeping the edits within that group similar? I use actions, and have a hard time getting this pictures to have the same "look". Do you guys right down exactly what actions were applied, at what opacity? Or is there some way to automate actions across an entire group of pictures to make it easier?