Last Updated on 12/15/2016 by Chris Gampat
Unless you are shooting in a studio environment with artificial light, chances are when you get home from a shoot that a lot of the time you will have a lot of varying exposures. This can be a pain when you start processing your images, because a lot of images from the same scene may have exposure variances ranging from minor to major – and it can take forever to try and match them all up one by one.
Luckily, for those in the know, there is an easy way in Lightroom to quickly match the exposures of all your images. This is an incredible time saver, and while it’s not perfect, it is much faster than trying to do it manually, and you always tweak individual images here or there as needed anyway (rather than having to tweak them ALL one by one).
Adobe’s Benjamin Warde comes to us with a video in their Lightroom Coffee Break series featuring a quick tutorial on making use of this incredibly useful feature of Lightroom. Lightroom Coffee Break, in case you are not aware, is made up of useful Lightroom tutorials focusing on a specific feature or technique which is highlighted in under 60 seconds.
This technique for matching exposures in Lightroom is generally meant for images that have been shot in the same scene at the same time but just have exposure variances. This is not meant to be a tool that you load up with a ton of images from varying scenes or locations. I actually use this tool all the time with my boudoir photography because I shoot primarily with natural light and I like to use Auto-ISO and adjust my exposure in camera with my exposure comp dial.
The downside to this is that, depending on where I am metering, the ISO the camera decides to use will of course vary from shot to shot. This tool in Lightroom makes it easy to load up my session and match all of the similar images quickly and without hassle.
If you are in a similar situation, where you have a lot of images of varying exposure from the same scene, I highly recommend giving this tool a shot next time. It saves me time in my work flow every day.