Making a set of photos match

A set of pictures reads as a set because of what they have in common, and colour is the thing an eye notices first. Here is how far one look gets you, and where it stops.

Why one look goes a long way

Somebody scrolling a gallery is not comparing your photographs to each other carefully. They are noticing, in about a fifth of a second per image, whether the colour of one resembles the colour of the last. A run of frames that all lean slightly warm with slightly lifted shadows reads as deliberate. The same frames with three different casts between them reads as a folder.

That is why one look applied at one strength does most of the work of making a set cohere, and why it does it more reliably than adjusting each picture toward some ideal. A shared transform is shared exactly. Twelve individual judgements made over an hour are twelve slightly different judgements, and your eye drifts across that hour in ways you will not notice until the set is side by side.

On this site the mechanism is deliberately dull: the look and the strength you have chosen stay chosen when you open the next photograph. Pick once, then feed the run through one at a time, pressing D to save each one. Nothing is remembered between visits and nothing is stored anywhere — close the tab and the choice goes with it — but within a sitting it holds.

Getting the choice right first

Choose the look on the hardest frame in the set, not the prettiest. The prettiest picture will survive almost any grade; the hardest one is what decides whether the look is usable across the whole run. Usually that means the frame with the most skin in it, or the one shot under the most peculiar light.

Then check the choice against the extremes: the brightest frame and the darkest. Some looks put a colour into the shadows and a different one into the highlights, so a picture that is mostly dark and a picture that is mostly bright end up leaning opposite ways under the same table. If that happens, either move to a look with less split in it or bring the strength down until the two ends stop disagreeing.

The frames that will fight you

Mixed light in one picture and not in the next

A frame lit half by a window and half by a warm lamp already contains two colour temperatures. A look that leans warm will push the lamp side further and the window side into something odd, while doing neither on the frame next to it that was shot entirely outdoors. This is the commonest reason a set refuses to settle, and the honest answer is that it is a lighting problem the grade inherited rather than one the grade caused.

Wildly different exposure

Looks with a lifted black point put a floor under the shadows. On a normally exposed picture that reads as a gentle faded quality; on a very dark picture it reads as a grey veil across the whole frame, because most of that picture is living down where the lift is happening. Bring the strength down for the dark frames rather than changing the look, and the set stays recognisably one set.

One picture with a dominant colour nothing else has

A single frame containing a large red object in a set that is otherwise green and grey will move more than its neighbours under any look that touches saturation, simply because it has more colour to be moved. It is worth looking at that frame at two or three different strengths before deciding the look is wrong.

Varying strength instead of varying look

When one photograph in a run needs to be different, change the number and not the name. A set graded with the same look at 80, 65 and 80 per cent still reads as one set, because the direction of every shift is identical and only the amount moved. A set where one frame has a different look in it reads as an odd one out, however carefully the second look was chosen.

A useful habit is to settle on a strength for the set and then allow yourself one step of fifteen either side for the awkward frames. The up and down arrows move in fives, so that is three presses at most, and zero puts it back to full if you want to start the decision again.

What is not here yet

A queue that takes a folder, applies one look to all of it and hands back an archive is the obvious companion to this page and it is not in this release. What is here is the same pipeline run one file at a time with the decision held between them, which gets the same result more slowly and has the advantage that you see every frame before it is saved — which, on a set with a couple of awkward pictures in it, is what you would want to be doing anyway.

One look cannot correct for the light the pictures were taken in. If half the set was shot under a warm indoor bulb and half by daylight, a shared grade lands on two different starting points and produces two different results — the difference between them may even widen. Matching the light comes before matching the look, and it is a correction job rather than a grading one.
Nothing about your choice survives closing the tab. There are no favourites, no saved presets and no history on this site, because keeping any of that would mean writing something about your session to the device, and the whole promise here is that nothing is written down. Within one sitting the look persists across as many photographs as you open; between sittings you choose again.

A working order that tends to hold

Pick the awkward frame. Try the packs on it until one look is obviously closer than the others. Settle the strength on that frame with the space bar held down every few seconds so you keep seeing what the original looked like. Then open the brightest and the darkest frames in the set and confirm the choice survives both. Only then start working through the run — and if the fourth picture makes you want to change the look, change it and go back to the first three, because a set graded two ways is worse than a set graded once slightly wrongly.