Struggling with consistent photo editing – any advice?

I have an issue when editing a larger collection of photos, for example, from holidays. I edit photos one by one, and of course, at the end, I end up with a mix of different ‘styles.’ What is your way to solve this issue? How do you edit photos so that they are consistent together? I’m adding an example of some photos from last year’s vacation.

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I had the same issue until I bought a Fuji camera :slight_smile: and used out of camera jpegs. It is really the only way I was able to achieve consistency.
At least try to limit oneself to one camera is helpful.
I would love to hear from others how it is possible to get one “style” from several different camera in various different situations.

I shoot most of my photos with highlight-weighted metering, so I get a mish-mash of exposures I have to work with in post, but I don’t blow highlights. I’ll look over my batch proofs and find sequences shot under the same lighting, modify the first one to suit, then delete the other proofs and batch re-process them with the first image’s toolchain. I do this with my own software, don’t know how you’d do similar with darktable, but you might look for a way to copy white balance and tone tool from image to image…

I am using a Fuji camera, but my feeling is that JPGs are not the solution because, in the end, I edit almost every JPG anyway, so there is no significant benefit to using JPG.

Edit them in batches.

I’ve just started to do this. I usually photograph four or five musicians on stage. I use the colour ratings, one to each musician. This makes culling and editing simpler. Especially with copying and pasting settings.

I haven’t explored tags. I’ve used rating and colour. dt provides at least these means of “batching” pictures, whatever the subject.

Just use the same settings for all photos! :slight_smile:

The only difference should be exposure adjustments and crops.

My answer to this problem is to create a style that is applied at the start of the editing process. This then gives a consistent starting point. @DanielLikesDT solution was to use the camera’s JPG, but I want the extra benefits of editing RAW files. So my style simulates the look of the camera’s JPG while still being a RAW file. But what is really noticeable is the extra detail and sharpness of this edited RAW file compared to the JPG. It is so much better.

I created this style by opening the cameras JPG in DT and taking a snapshot. I then opened the RAW file and set the exposure module to match the JPG image. I then used modules as shown to make the raw image more like the camera’s jpg.


I found I had to play with chroma values in the color zones module to get a similar color look to the camera’s JPG. White balance alone wasn’t going to achieve this.
image

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