How to match the colour of two photos

Matching two photos is one problem wearing two hats. Either the photos are of the same scene and you want them consistent — two cameras at a wedding, a sequence shot as the light changed — or they are unrelated and you want them to share a look. The method below handles the first case directly and gets you most of the way through the second.

Set up so you can actually see

In Lightroom Classic, select both photos in the Develop module and press Y for before/after, or use the Survey view (N) in Library to put them side by side. Set both photos to the same Profile before anything else. Then stop looking at them for a moment and open the histogram; you are going to work off numbers first and eyes second.

Step 1: neutrals

Find something in each photo that should be neutral grey or white — a wall, a shirt, a cloud, a road. Hover the eyedropper over it and read the RGB percentages under the histogram. In a true neutral, the three numbers are equal. Whatever the gap is between them is your colour cast, and it is the single biggest reason two photos feel mismatched.

Correct each photo to neutral independently with Temp and Tint. Do not try to match photo B to photo A yet — get both to neutral first. Two neutral photos already match far better than two photos you nudged toward each other by eye.

Step 2: exposure and the black point

Pick a tonal landmark present in both frames — the same subject, the same sky, the same skin. Read its luminance in each and use Exposure to bring them together. Then set the black point: hold Option/Alt while dragging Blacks and stop just before clipping. Do this in both. Photos that disagree about where black is will never look like a set, however well the colour matches.

If the two photos came from the same shoot but different cameras or different meterings, Settings → Match Total Exposures (Cmd/Ctrl+Opt/Alt+Shift+M) will do the first pass for you across a whole selection.

Step 3: contrast, using the curve

Now compare the shape of the two histograms rather than their position. A histogram bunched in the middle is flat; one spread to both edges is contrasty. Use the point curve, not the Contrast slider, so you can fix the part that differs. If photo B's shadows are flatter than A's, steepen only the lower third of B's curve. Contrast is a slope, and slopes are local.

Step 4: hue

With neutrals, exposure and contrast aligned, the remaining differences are in specific colours. Use the Color Mixer and the targeted adjustment tool: click the small circular icon in the panel, then drag directly on a colour in the image. Work band by band, and make the smaller correction to the photo that is further from where you want to end up rather than meeting in the middle.

Skin is the priority. Human vision is far more sensitive to skin tone error than to anything else in the frame; if the skin matches, viewers will forgive a fair amount of disagreement in foliage and sky.

Step 5: check with the lights off

Two checks that catch what your eyes will not. First, press \ repeatedly to flick between before and after, and watch what jumps. Second, temporarily add a heavy desaturation to both and compare them in near-monochrome; if the tonal relationships disagree, the colour match will never hold, and you need to go back to step 2.

The faster route when the photos are the same frame

Everything above is for photos of different scenes. If you have the same frame twice — an original and a version somebody graded, or a JPEG your camera produced next to your raw — the difference is measurable directly. Bin the pixels by input value, take the median output per bin per channel, and you have the transform. That is what PresetForge does in before/after mode, and it produces a per-channel curve rather than a set of slider guesses, in a couple of seconds.

The result is also reusable. Once the transform is a preset you can apply it to the rest of the shoot, or export it as a .cube LUT and carry the same match into video from the same event.

Batch consistency across a whole shoot

Once two photos match, propagate. Select the corrected photo first, then the others, and use Sync… (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+S) with only the settings you want to carry ticked — usually curve, Color Mixer and Color Grading, and definitely not white balance if the light changed during the shoot. See batch applying a preset in Lightroom Classic for the difference between Sync, Auto Sync and Quick Develop, which is not obvious and matters.