Exposure matching

[yoshi]

Not sure if this is possible.
But I took a photo last month (JPEG)

Now I would like to take some very similar pictures over a series of weeks/months, and put them in a sequence when done.

I will take the rest of them in RAW but was wondering is there a simple way to try and balance the exposure of all the images once done, and also if there is an easy way to crop them all to the same dimensions and easily get the compositions in the same place in the frame?

This might not make any sense but I hope at least some one picks up on what I am babbling about

 

[Chappers]

Balancing the exposure and colour balance could be very simple. Try to include a grey reference card in each photo. This can either be in an area that will be cropped out, or taken in an initial exposure. You can use this to then measure the RGB values in each image and match them to reference image.

However different lighting conditions would give a different result. Even though you have matched your reference point, a shot taken in sunny conditions would have a different look to one taken in cloudy.

You would also have to ensure you were in exactly the same spot with the lens, focus ,and aperture the same for all shots through the sequence

Aligning may be a bit more problematical depending on the software you have. In CS4 there is a command to align layers by content. This is used for HDR and focus stacking. I'm not sure if you could use this to align the images as layers and then copy each layer to a separate canvas. Might be worth a try though

 

[swanseamale47]

Following the above once you have the layers aligned and cropped to suit in photoshop, go to file/scripts/export layers to files, this will export them as seperate images, easier than making a seperate canvas for each.

 

[yoshi]

thanks for the tips, much appreciated!