I want a software that lets you select a whole folder or group of images, then it finds the most normal or average lighting conditions in the set (or lets you pick one to match), and adjusts each photo individually by different amounts so that the final product is your whole group of photos that you started with, but now the dark ones are light, and the light ones come down - without the fuss of correcting them all by hand one at a time.

Define what you mean by the darkness/lightness of an image - I doubt it's anything as simple as the average luminance. At the end of the day you have the problem that the software doesn't know whether it is looking at a white wall in dim light or a black wall in bright light.

Have you thought of just bracketing and throwing shots away? You'd have three (or more) times as many images to look at, but it would probably be simple to write a script that selects the middle ev shot from each three and then replaces it with the plus or minus tweaked shot on the press of a key; a few lines of scripting code - might be cheap on fivver. Or use a mirrorless - you see your final image in the viewfinder, so you can eyeball each exposure dead-on.

anchev wrote:
What you describe is impossible without intelligent control of the process. Software cannot see and understand light. All it knows is 0 and 1.

Completely wrong. Modern cameras recognize generic and even individual faces, and metering algorithms like Nikon SRS use image recognition for metering - they look for objects they can recognize and then use them to set exposure. (Eg they look for face, run a heuristic to decide whether it is Asian/Caucausian or a darker skin tone, and include that knowledge in their exposure calculations.) That computers are at their base level binary is irrelevant as your brain being based electrochemical processes; they're Turing complete systems.

However, nobody has put a system as sophisticated as SRS into a post processor. And even SRS isn't infallible - but it does show that a camera can understand light (ie elements of the scene content and therefore the conditions) to some degree. AWB is another example - some AWB algorithms are now very good indeed; I can't remember seeing a single shot my Fuji got wrong. This again operates on some "understanding" of the light.

It has no way to decide when a photo is visually pleasing to a particular viewer.

There is a big gap between art criticism and exposure control...

...But no one has bothered building an exposure system this sophisticated into post processing software, so it doesn't help the OP much.

anchev wrote:
My previous post was an answer to the OP.

Yes, I know. I was correcting it so you don't spread misinformation. And also because switching to a camera with a more sophisticated exposure system might be the answer to the OP's problems. I don't know if the OP is using flash and how well SRS in  high-end Nikons works with it, but for natural light it seems very impressive.

thiswayup wrote:
Yes, I know. I was correcting it so you don't spread misinformation.

Thank you so much. I wasn't aware you are the ultimate source of correct information on this website.

However next time you try to instruct me what to do or not, your highness may want to check the forum rules first.

thiswayup wrote:
Completely wrong. Modern cameras recognize generic and even individual faces, and metering algorithms like Nikon SRS use image recognition for metering - they look for objects they can recognize and then use them to set exposure. (Eg they look for face, run a heuristic to decide whether it is Asian/Caucausian or a darker skin tone, and include that knowledge in their exposure calculations.) That computers are at their base level binary is irrelevant as your brain being based electrochemical processes; they're Turing complete systems.

Is this true, or are you lying again to feel important, like you did when you claimed Sean Archer didn't like his Canon 6D and he sold it?  Even though Sean Archer himself denies that's true, told me personally, and in fact, continues to shoot with it to this day.

I only ask because you sure sounded very much like an authority there too; you mentioned it several times over pages of discussion. So I'm sure you can understand why anyone would have to seriously question any claims of yours that are supposedly facts now too.

DespayreFX wrote:
Is this true, or are you lying again to feel important, like you did when you claimed Sean Archer didn't like his Canon 6D and he sold it?  Even though Sean Archer himself denies that's true, told me personally, and in fact, continues to shoot with it to this day.

This is a stupid thing for you to write. If Archer did tell you that (and hey, you might be a liar) someone with a brain would consider that I might have made an honest mistake, ***based on what people told me and the fact that he is now shooting with an EM1***, hmm??? (And I have to point out that someone with a brain would wonder if Archer told you that to keep the possibility of Canon sponsorship open, given that he is SHOOTING with the EM1! Which is a strange thing to do if you have a fullframe camera you supposedly like. Especially as he seems to be a single focal length man and uses natural light, so the 6D set-up wouldn't exactly be hard to move around... Canon and Nikon ambassadorships are hugely lucrative; I don't think anyone sensible would expect him to public discuss the 6D's demonstrably awful focus accuracy away from the centre point.)

As for whether Nikon SRS exists, or camera eye detect focus... Dear God, you strange, silly man - can't you use google? Nikon SRS:

http://www.nikonusa.com/en/learn-and-ex … d-srs.html

Eye detect focus:

http://fujifilm-x.com/af/en/af_mode/eye_af.html

Really, it isn't hard, is it? Those were the first links for each google search.

To give a hopefully idiot-proof example of how an SRS system would work in principle:

- Scan the scene for an eye
- The brightest part of the eye can reasonably be assumed to be a known fairly light grey value (the white of the eye)
- The darkest part of the eye will will be a darker grey

..A high-end system like SRS will be much more sophisticated and look for a wider range of known objects and combine values so it won't be too often misled by eyes in shadow etc. Eg if the white of the eye isn't more or less the brightest part of the face, you know that the eye is in shadow. On-top of hand coded rules like that you'd probably run a data base compiled from example scenes using some sort of nearest neighbour classifier. Which probably sounds like something out of a scifi movie if you use a 6D, but isn't all that much by Nikon or Panasonic standards. Eg my tiny, out of production GM1 can lock on a face and keep focus on it as the "actor" moves around while the camera shoots video.

thiswayup wrote:
This is a stupid thing for you to write. If Archer did tell you that (and hey, you might be a liar) someone with a brain would consider that I might have made an honest mistake, ***based on what people told me and the fact that he is now shooting with an EM1***, hmm??? (And I have to point out that someone with a brain would wonder if Archer told you that to keep the possibility of Canon sponsorship open, given that he is SHOOTING with the EM1! Which is a strange thing to do if you have a fullframe camera you supposedly like. Especially as he seems to be a single focal length man and uses natural light, so the 6D set-up wouldn't exactly be hard to move around...)...

Bahaha! Well, except for a couple of things, first of all, I pointed out in the thread that he had recently posted to 500px with images from the 6D, but you kept right on shooting your mouth off, in fact, more aggressively after that point... and then I posted a screencap of Sean answering the question, and the fact that he has no problem with the focusing system that you disliked so much. You didn't make a mistake, re-read the thread if you need to. You stated it as fact, multiple times, when it clearly wasn't, and had already been pointed out to you as fact, that you were wrong. So I guess, as you say, one of us is certainly a liar. You and I both *know* who that is, I'll leave the thread here so others can make up their own mind. And in the meantime, maybe you should get your information from somewhere better than "what people told me", although, it's good enough for Trump as a source, so I can see how you'd be easily fooled by it too... that's a powerful source you have there for 3 pages of discussion about something you knew nothing about but continued to malign despite the reality of the situation being the exact opposite...

Here's a link to the last page of the thread where you can read Sean's words for yourself, and so can everyone else. Feel free to confirm it with him if you think I'm lying. His exact words are "I still use it a lot", as you can see from my screencap. So just because you think it's "strange"... turns out, the world isn't all about what you think... whether that's "strange", or "stupid", or any of the other silly things you throw out in these forums.  So ya, pretty reasonable for anyone to question things you claim as being actual "facts"... although, maybe you just have a different definition for that word, that would explain both you *and* Donald.

https://www.modelmayhem.com/forums/post/876372/3

DespayreFX wrote:
and then I posted a screencap of Sean answering the question, and the fact that he has no problem with the focusing system that you disliked so much.

Actually its LensRentals that "dislikes" it. Except they don't - not being idiot fanbois, they noted it's good for low light (event shooting) but bad for high accuracy (portrait work.)

Here's a link to the last page of the thread where you can read Sean's words for yourself, and so can everyone else.

Again, it seems idiotic to me to expect Archer to offend a sponsor that anyone in his position would be courting. I accept that to someone with sufficiently lower intelligence that this problem won't be comprehensible, however.

Objectively, measurably, the 6D's focus system has poor accuracy by modern standards. You were silly enough to buy one for work where focus accuracy matters; being a certain sort of person, you don't like being told this.

...But it has nothing to do with this thread or the fact that you're too lazy to use google.

(Btw: if you'd been sensible enough to read the LensRentals article instead of trying to save your ego, you'd know there is a workaround for the focus problem..)

thiswayup wrote:
...a bunch of stuff here to deflect from the fact that he got caught in a great big lie...

I just asked if you were lying again, why so defensive?

BTW, could not be more thrilled with my 6D, very happy with all my little awards so far, and my publishers like my work too, guess I'll just have to find some way to be ok with the fact that you don't approve... or are you lying about that again too?

Mike Yamin wrote:
The closest thing I can think of is the "match total exposure" feature in Lightroom. It isn't perfect, but ideally you'd set the exposure correction on one image and it will attempt to match the other images to that. So, the first image might require a .5 exposure adjustment, while others get a .35, .67, 1, or whatever it takes to visually match the level of exposure.

This is exactly what the OP needs, I have used it in batch of photos with similar setups and works quite well.

There's an article in PetaPixel about that: http://petapixel.com/2014/12/15/tip-use … quick-fix/

HV images wrote:

This is exactly what the OP needs, I have used it in batch of photos with similar setups and works quite well.

There's an article in PetaPixel about that: http://petapixel.com/2014/12/15/tip-use … quick-fix/

In Nikon View NX you can do something similar. I took the settings from one photo and then clicked them on each image--quite fast-but it tooks a while for the settings to process.