On realistic images – My early attempts years ago yielded just that, but refiement in my workflow (read as *patience and experimentation*) have gotten me to the point I use HDR whenever the subject will hold still enough for a bracketed burst.

On time to produce the final image – My experience is that it’s a trade-off between lighting and post-production; your option. I might be a die hard lighting fan if I had the time to become really proficient. My HDRs helped a client win several custom builder awards in the high-end Washington, DC – MD – VA region, so I have no personal doubt about HDR being a viable way to deliver stunning images.

Thanks for pushing the envelope on the art form with your discussion!

Alan

I was following this discussion for a while in the forum, and to be honest, I find the use of HDR in professional real estate photography quite exciting. As an outsider, I have never heard about flashes, but it sounds like a cheat to me.

In CG imagery we used to cheat the scene contrast all the time, simply because it is so easy to do. You have much more trouble with hardware and you can’t just disable the shadows of a light, so I imagine setting up flashes must be a big pain… But even for us CG artists, HDR is an enormous tool to “save an image in post”, which means to react to a client’s notes without much fuzz. Because we have the flexibility to do tune everything without a rerender (or reshoot).

Christian Bloch

HDR should preserve washed out whites as well as detail in the dark areas. AND as a bonus noise is eliminated. The combination of HDR processing with Photoshop should produce an image that is exactly what you see in a room. Using strobes produces a different look that is not “natural” at all. There are situations where strobes are “better” and situations were a more natural look is “better”.

David

It is a bit too much time for me, see from your first example; at down is your HDR result, on top is your second shot, with gamma and saturation adjusted to look similar:
http://dl.free.fr/b6XENyT2m/hdrtest.jpg

Your HDR is great to retain highlights, wahed out in the original photo, but it lacks a bit of the directionality of the light, and the adjusted version looks good enough for me.

(Please don’t be offended by my lack of application, and poor usage of the english language subtilities.)

http://www.davidpalermo.com/hdrtest4.jpg

The yellow circles are where I metered. In the light image I wanted detail in the shadows – see yellow circle. In the dark image I wanted detail in the highlights so I metered on the brightest white cloud. I set my exposure on the light image and counted -2EV until I reached the setting in the dark image. I then used Photomatix to process the RAW images. I could have used Photoshop but like I mentioned earlier for some reason Photomatix worked better for me especially in the thin needly area on the pine trees. I then adjust contrast etc.. in Photoshop.

I’d upload the Radiant file for you to play with but it’s 40MB.

David

http://www.davidpalermo.com/beach

I will post the 5 shots that went into making this file later today.

Marc: Do my examples look “foggy”? They don’t here on my monitor. Maybe I need to re-calibrate my monitor. Hmmm… let me know…

Also, Marc this beach scene (http://www.davidpalermo.com/beach) just could not have been done with one shot. See here: http://www.davidpalermo.com/IMG_2131.jpg

Shot with a Canon 5D.

If I expose for the background sky/water the foreground would be too dark. Sure I could use LightRoom’s “Fill Light” slider but it’d produce a lot of noise in the shadows which is unacceptable to me. I could also have lit it with a ton of lights but I don’t have that kind of lighting and it’d be very hard to make it look as realistic as I did with HDR techniques. What else could I do in a scene like this? I guess I could have done it like what Larry mentioned earlier – manually with the masking approach (and for years I have been doing that with good results). But if you look at the trees and the sky through the trees you just can’t get it to look as real without making most of the branches go too dark… that’s just too tedious for me. Right now since I am able to make these scenes look “real” I am excited (like a new toy!). so I am learning as much as I can with this and will apply it to a “real” job in January in Florida at a resort… that will be a real test for me. I am confident I can get MUCH better results using the HDR approach than I have ever been able to. We’ll see! Keep your fingers crossed!

David

Thanks,

David