PS CS2: How to match colors across multiple photos

largelylivin

Here's a problem that keeps coming up that I don't know how to handle. Example: two or more photos with big expanses of blue sky. How do I make the sky the same color on more than one photo? I assume there is a fairly automated way to do this other than manually tweeking the HSM.

dadwtwins

largelylivin wrote:

Here's a problem that keeps coming up that I don't know how to handle. Example: two or more photos with big expanses of blue sky. How do I make the sky the same color on more than one photo? I assume there is a fairly automated way to do this other than manually tweeking the HSM.

unfortunately there is not. Each picture will have slightly different colors since you are not shooting the exact same shoot, with same exposure settings, same angle of shoot, etc...

as far as i know, there is no automated action that will actually take in account your before color to go to a fix color you choose.

You can batch process for contrast, curves and such but the end results will still all be different.:(

jfriend

largelylivin wrote:

Here's a problem that keeps coming up that I don't know how to handle. Example: two or more photos with big expanses of blue sky. How do I make the sky the same color on more than one photo? I assume there is a fairly automated way to do this other than manually tweeking the HSM.

Unless you expose for the sky and take a bunch of pictures with the same white balance and same exposure, you won't get the same sky color from one image to the next. What most people don't realize is that usually we are metering for a subject in the image, not the sky, and if it's a bright object (like a snowy scene in daylight) you will get a dark blue sky because your exposure is letting less light in and if it's a darker object (a person in full shade, for example) you will get a much lighter sky because your exposure is letting a lot more light in. When you let more light in from the same sky, you get a much lighter colored sky. In the extreme, what is actually a blue sky will even come out white looking in your photos if you were exposing for a darker subject.

So, from this you can see that if you wanted the skies to be the same out of the camera, you'd have to use manual exposure and use the same exposure for each shot (or spot meter off the sky with the same EV settings for all shots).

For trying to fix the skies in multiple photos after the fact to be the same, I only know of the manual method of tweaking the luminosity of the blues and maybe the hue also to make two skies shot with different exposures be similar. It is probably possible to create an action that would let you select a rough area of the blue sky, take an average tone from that (by blurring it and sampling the tone/color) and then tweak the colors to match a specific target value, but I don't know of any existing action that would do that.

I never figured out myself how to use the match color feature in CSx, but it might be worth checking into that also.