Vissual Consistency within a Photo Series

Flrbb · January 9, 2026, 10:27am

Lately, I’ve been enjoying shooting photo series. These photos show the same subject from different perspectives, some times with a moving sky and only light cloud cover. As a result, the exposure triangle of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO is heavily stressed, and the color temperature (cloudy/sunny) also affects the RAW image.

I want these photos to have similar looks. Just aplying a preset changes the general style of those photos, but the detail of e.g. darker/lighter images remains.

For now, I manually use the sliders of Gamma, Temperature and Brightness for each and every photo individually. Unfortunately, this is very time-consuming.

Are there other options (sliders) that I have overlooked so far which might help? Is there a feature to adjust exposure over a photo series or somtheing like that?

gserim · January 9, 2026, 10:43am

Take photos with and without a colour chart each time, develop the image with the colour chart and copy the corrections into the image without the colour chart.

Flrbb · January 9, 2026, 6:34pm

Welp, as most of my photos do live in the moment, I can rarely take double shots.

stuck · January 9, 2026, 6:57pm

Have you explored the options in the ‘LUT Grading’ panel?

Wolfgang · January 9, 2026, 7:01pm

Did you try Smart Lighting

in Uniform and / or Spot Weighted mode?
This can help you quickly adjust the exposure (to compensate for it to a certain extent). Check the → manual for some more info.

To achieve a more uniform color temperature, select a photo from the series that you like and apply this setting to all selected photos. I assume this works as long as the color temperature captured by your camera hasn’t changed significantly during the series.

Good luck

gserim · January 9, 2026, 7:14pm

OK, that doesn’t make sense. That would be a typical task for Photolab’s AI department. Describe your requirements and get some suggestions. There’s still a blank spot in Photolab’s range of functions.

Joanna · January 10, 2026, 10:50am

Maybe the best way I can explain what I want to say is to show you a clip from a demonstration video I made for a lecture…

This shows what happens if I set the camera to auto-WB…

The left shot is taken with the light coming from behind the camera and the right taken against the light.

So, you can’t rely on auto-WB at the time of taking for matching

Next, I used a colorimeter to measure the temperature and set the camera to that temperature for each shot…

You can see that, with the light from behind, it measured 5150°K and against the light, it measured 8580°K. This is due to the blue of the sky “cooling down” the colours but, when you take against the light the lack of blue in the sky behind you warms things up.

Then, if you watch this short video…

… you will see that the two bottom shots might not appear the same to start with but, as you eliminate the surrounding areas, a patch of the chair back actually looks identical, because I compensated for the changed WB at the time of taking.

I’m not sure if @gserim’s colour chart idea would work but it might be worth a try. At least, to get the WB close.

Maybe a grey card might be a better option, as that should change the exposure as well?

My personal view is that you need to compensate at the time of shooting like I did, as you say the lighting is affected by the changing sky and that will affect both dynamic range and colour balance.

Unless the new AI tools can pull something out of the bag, I’m not sure if I can be of any more help.

Stenis · January 10, 2026, 2:45pm

Maybe it is Capture One you should look at in that case because they have that solution I would like Photolab also to have. It is called “Match Look”.

Match Look lets you transfer the look from reference images to your raw files in a few seconds.

Capture One will automatically apply adjustments using existing tools to get as close as possible to the look in one click.

Learn how to -

Add reference images
Apply to single or batches of images
Fine tune the look
Save a Match Look Style

For now there is nothing like this is Photolab