Can Lightroom batch-correct uneven background lighting using a reference frame?
Asked 8/8/2019
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2 answers
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I have a large set of RAW images shot with slightly uneven lighting, plus a separate photo of the empty white background made under the same setup. I’d like to use that blank frame as a reference to flatten the background across all the other images, similar to flat-field correction used in scanning. Ideally I want a workflow that works in batch and avoids creating lots of intermediate files. Can Lightroom do this directly, or is another tool better suited?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
6y ago
2 Answers
1
Lightroom is a tool for graphical interaction with images rather than batch processing. For your use case Imagemagick looks better suited. There is also a tutorial for this: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/compose/#divide
Originally by user55880. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user55880
6y ago
0
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Lightroom isn’t really designed for this kind of reference-image correction. It’s mainly a tool for interactive editing, and it doesn’t have a built-in way to use one image as a correction map for another in batch the way a flat-field workflow would require.
Based on the answers, a better fit is ImageMagick, which can batch-process images and supports this kind of divide/composite correction workflow.
If your lighting issue is simple and consistent, a Lightroom-compatible workaround is to apply the same gradient correction to every frame, for example with a graduated filter or a plugin such as Color Efex Pro. That can help if the unevenness is predictable, but it is not the same as using the blank reference image mathematically.
So: if you specifically want to use the blank background image as a correction map, Lightroom is not the right tool; use a batch-processing tool like ImageMagick instead.
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