Match Total Exposures

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markbeckelman

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I read about the Match Total Exposures feature in Martin's Evening's Lightroom 2 book, and thought it would be great for the those instances where I needed a quick correction to a bunch of images that whose exposures were all over the map.

So I went into Develop, most-selected the correctly exposed image, and selected the other images I wanted to match to it. I went to Settings>Match Total Exposures, and did not get any noticeable change in any of the files (however the history panel showed that the command was enacted).

What am I missing here??
 
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The intent of this function is to account for changes in the 'camera settings' between shots in a series. Suppose you've twiddled aperture, shutter speed and ISO, either for creative effect, or for changing light. LR will attempt to set the Develop mode exposure slider to compensate/equalize these changes.

If your series was all shot at the same EV, I wouldn't expect to see much difference from using the function.

(This function was created for LR at the specific instigation of uber-Guru Lee Jay Fingersh, who lobbied endlessly over a period of months to address a need that he perceived that could easily be automated. You can also credit a lot of the usability of the Local Adjustment interface to his determined testing and suggestions.)
 
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Brad Snyder said:
The intent of this function is to account for changes in the 'camera settings' between shots in a series. Suppose you've twiddled aperture, shutter speed and ISO, either for creative effect, or for changing light. LR will attempt to set the Develop mode exposure slider to compensate/equalize these changes.

If your series was all shot at the same EV, I wouldn't expect to see much difference from using the function.
Click to expand...

I think that's the issue. My camera settings were the same for all the files, but exposure varied due to my inconsistent on-camera flash output. Does that seem to make sense?

By the way, many thanks for everyone's helpful comments.

Mark
 
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Yep, makes sense. All it does is evaluate the ISO, exposure time, and aperture for all the images, and adjust the Exposure to match the most selected.

For example, if your most selected is 1/6' at f/5.6, ISO 1'', and you've got another at 1/25', f/5.6, ISO 2'', then it will adjust the second one to Exposure +1.''.

But it doesn't know anything about your flashes (or the ambient light), so there's nothing it can do about it.
 
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Just for edification, you might look at the before/after (using develop history) of the exposure slider settings, on a couple of the images that seem unchanged.

Thinking my way through this, I would expect that if all the images had the same in-camera EV settings, then the develop slider would remain unchanged after the 'Match' function was applied. (If I understand correctly, the model image was not adjusted, it was just the best exposure example?) If the model/sample image had been adjusted, I would expect to see similar exposure slider changes in the remaining images.
 
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