Age vs. M_V for clusters in the Antennae (left panel – Whitmore et al. 2010), M 83 inner region (middle panel – Bastian et al. 2011) and M 83 outer region (right panel – Bastian et al. 2011). Only clusters with ages greater than 6 Myr were used. In all panels the brightest cluster in the sample is shown as a (green) filled circle. For the Antennae, the triangles represent the median of the age and M_V of clusters in the rest of the catalogue (in bins of four clusters). For M 83, each bin contains 10 clusters. In the middle/right panels, the model corresponding to the best fit results of Bastian et al. (2012) are shown as solid (red) lines. They have been corrected the a Salpeter stellar IMF adopted by the Larsen (2009) models in M ⋆  . For the Antennae data, the error bars represent the standard deviation for each bin. For the M 83 data, the error bars represent the region where 60% of the data in that bin lie. We note that the models also show such scatter, i.e. only the median of the models is shown.