Color balancing

[Tallis]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to make a photo collage of a bunch of people, and all the photos were taken in different lighting, and different places. These differences make them look out of balance and in need of some equalization. The one thing they have in common is that they are all faces.

I'm having a devil of a time making all the faces look similar in color/light. Some look gray, some green, some too dark. I've been trying several plugins to fix the color, ( like "richard rosenmans advanced color corrector", et al.), but these plugins remove color cast etc., based on the one photo, but of course they dont compare it to the _next_ photo, that's not what they were built for...

I know this is a pipe dream, but is there some sort of workflow, or some plugin product that can compare, say, 10 items of somewhat similar nature, then adjust each separately ( and differently ) so that afterward they all take on some sort of average brightness, and average color cast of all the 10 photos?

[raynerj1]

I have used transparencies to adjust the tone/color of a picture so I can use it in a composite. Usually I will just overlay the transparencies, then make a truecolor copy of the result, then slice and dice the result for use in the composite.

For an example of this in action, compare the souce .xar in this post to the end result of mine... http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=29760

The Flower was sliced out from the background. A transparency was used to darken the background the resultant bitmap was defocused. Then the origianl flower was placed back in and feathered to look appropriate.

I just pwayed around with the other two pics with frames/matting.