I hope people here can give me a bit more insight in the inner workings of RT. I firstly like to have my problem solved of course, but I also like to understand how/why a solution worked as I do intend to use the software a lot more. Coming from a much more limited software package where I learned the basics of RAW processing, RT has so many settings to play with
So after the short intro here is the problem I am currently trying to tackle:
For a report my girlfriend needed to take detailed pictures of many small objects (~1000 images in total). The pictures had to be shot outside on sunny days with all kinds of clouds floating past at inconvenient times. An umbrella prevented the harsh shadows but it didn’t do much against the changing light intensity. Furthermore, the shooting took place from the bright midday sun well into the evening. Many of the pictures therefore ended up with slightly different exposures (and white balances).
The idea is that the images should be directly comparable when placed side by side. The viewer should not mentally brighten a slightly underexposed image for the comparison but look at an accurate representation of the object in (seemingly) identical lighting conditions. I have created a profile in RT to set whitebalance, sharpen everything, enhance (micro)contrast etc. etc., but I can’t figure out how to give all images the same exposure. I dearly hope there is a way to do this automatically as I don’t fancy the idea of manually adjusting each picture.
There are 2 possible ways that might work, but I am not sure about this.
1: manually set the exposure to Auto in the .pp3 file of the profile but leave the other settings to the my input. Will this even work?? Or does the Auto setting extend to all settings in the Exposure tab such as contrast, highlights and blacks?
2: first batch process all pictures with the default and Automatic exposure settings to correct the exposure, then pass them through the batch processing again to apply my own settings but leave the just tweaked exposure untouched.
3: ? Is there a better way to approach this problem? Am I barking up the wrong tree to set a fixed white balance for all shots but change the exposure? Am I even tree-barking in the right forest or should I rethink the whole way of processing?
I am open to all suggestions, questions and remarks you might have.
A good point. First image is an example of the .pp3 file if you open it in Notepad or a similar editor. My first idea was to change under the [Exposure] part the setting Auto=false to true. Will RT then only change the exposure of the images or all other settings in that “paragraph” as well?
EDIT: I did find Rawpedia already, and it says [quote]The Auto Levels tool analyzes the histogram and then adjusts the controls in the Exposure section to achieve a well-exposed image. It uses only the “Exposure compensation”, Highlight
compression", “Highlight reconstruction”, “Black”, “Lightness” and “Contrast” sliders.[/quote] So I was wondering if you manually set the values for everything except the Exposure Compensation in the .pp3 file, but switch the Auto=false to Auto=true, will it still change all the values you already manually changed or will it only target the Exposure Compensation.
Underneath here are some examples of the what I mean by different exposures. The difference is more clearly visible in other pictures but this is what I could find on short notice.
Tweak one photo as you like it (white balance, sharpening, defringe, resize, crop, etc.), enable Auto Levels, copy the processing profile, go to the File Browser tab, select all photos, right-click and paste the processing profile. Done.
Should the automatically calculated exposure be too high or too low, before pasting the profile to the other photos, adjust it using the tone curves since you may not touch the Exposure slider.
I tried that (at least in the way I understood it, which is the normal approach to applying the same profile to a bunch of pictures in a batch). Thing is that the Auto Levels also changes the Contrast slider of the files which is the thing I do not want it to do in any way. I only want the exposure to change without going through 1000 pictures and tweak it manually (i.e. move the entire histogram to the left or right a bit, no other changes needed).
Do you want the contrast to be a constant value for all the images? If so - maybe create a second .pp3 file with only setting the Contrast to your value, and apply it after your first step to reset the contrast?
Yep, contrast should be constant.
I thought I might have to work with a second profile but couldn’t yet quite work out how the “full” and “partial” saving of a profile work. Will give your suggestion a go now. Will come back with the result in a bit
Here is a .pp3 file with only Contrast applied (it’s at 100 - open in a text editor and change to an appropriate value for you). Test it by opening an image, applying some modifications to exposure or other values, then load this .pp3 - the only thing you should see change is the contrast going to 100.
I’d also very much love to have an auto-expose tool that only adjusts exposure and nothing else. My Feeling is that shis probably is a fairly reasonable an basic (read: common) desire.
