Photography For Real Estate

Last week Dave Baxter, in upstate New York, told me that he was inspired by all the talk here on the blog about Exposure Fusion and wanted to know which camera body would be the best for shooting auto exposure brackets (AEB). While I knew that the recent Nikon DSLRs would shoot 8 EV of [...]

Even though Russell Brown, the long time Photoshop evangelist uses the Nik HDR Pro Plugin in this tutorial to illustrate how to move away from over saturated and super sharpened HDR images. This is very appropriate for real estate photography and I believe the workflow he uses could easily be used with Photomatix or other tone mapping [...]

Just incase you didn’t notice, last Saturday HDRsoft released version 4.1 of Photomatix Pro. Here is a list of the new features from the HDRsoft.com site: Ability to select a region on the Tone Mapping/Fusion preview and replace it with a source photo. A “Selection Mode” option on the Preview window lets users select one [...]

As a result of the post I did yesterday taking a poll on the lighting techniques that real estate photographers use, a couple of readers asked, “what is Exposure Fusion?” The short answer is: Exposure Fusion (EF) is a slightly different way to process bracketed images just like you would shoot for HDR. Exposure Fusion [...]

I wanted to point out that Architectural Photographer Chad Jackson has a useful review/tutorial of the Donation-ware Lightroom/Enfuse plugin by Timothy Armes. I’m a big fan of this plugin and did a video tutorial on Lightroom/Enfuse a number of years ago. This plugin has been around since Feb of 2008 and is based on the work by [...]

Last week my wife Levi got a e-mail flyer for a new listing in Redmond, WA on Seattle’s Eastside. She forwarded it to me as she exclaimed how this single little front shot made her want to go see this little cottage. This is exactly what front shots are suppose to do right? While what [...]

Note: that this post is by Iran Watson a Realtor/real estate photographer in the North Metro Atlanta area. One of the most frequently asked questions I get is how I use the “Flash/Ambient Hybrid” technique when photographing interiors. Although it sounds somewhat complicated on the surface, the concept is really quite simple. The execution, however, [...]

Thanks to Fred Lord for pointing out this recent article over at digitalphotopro.com that tests the noise in images taken over the whole range of ISO settings. Conventional wisdom has always been that with all DSLRs the lower the ISO the lower the noise. This test shows that this may not be completely true. For [...]

I’ve been using HDRexpress from Unified Color for the last couple of days and I’m impressed with how quickly you can get an a final image with natural looking color from a series of brackets. It has an intuitive interface and a straight forward two step process of first choosing a tone mapping preset that [...]

PFRE reader Jukka Töyli of Tampere, Finland sent me some images from a pre-production Sony Alpha A55 that he is testing for Sony of Finland. This Sony model was announced in late August. The feature that Jukka’s images demonstrates is a new implementation of in camera “HDR”. The press release describes this feature as follows: [...]

Last week HDRsoft released version 4.0 of what has pretty much become the “gold standard” for doing HDR and Exposure Fusion for real estate photography. This new version has the following major new features: A selective de-ghosting tool that allows you to selectively decide which image and part of an image to take for the [...]

I ran across this video today and I can’t help but comment on the issue of “dirty whites” in HDR processing. The shots in this video are a great illustration of the issue of “dirty whites” that real estate photographers run into. Notice how the whites and other lighter colors in most of the interior [...]

I was watching The Tech Guy podcast this afternoon and was please to find that Leo had Trey Ratcliff from StuckInCustoms.com on the show. For those of you that don’t recognize Trey’s name, Trey is one of the top practitioners and spokesmen for HDR these days. His work is very popular and he wrote the book, [...]

This last week we’ve had three new post processing products that are of interest to real estate photographers announced. Since I’ve had an unusually busy week last week I’ve not had time to use any of these three products but I’m in the process of trying them out. The three products are: HDR Expose by [...]

In Part 1 of this post I showed examples of the fact that three, brackets are not always enough to capture the full dynamic range in a scene. And posed the question, “how do you make sure you capture the full dynamic range?” There are several methods: Shoot more brackets than you need: With this [...]

There are many real estate photographers that have realized that shooting a series of bracketed exposures and using the Exposure Fusion (EF) feature in Photomatix or one of the many other EF applications is a quick and easy way to getting good quality interior shots. Not as high a quality as multiple off camera flashes [...]

I did a post last August on HDR Studio when unifiedcolor.com released their Windows only version. They recently released a Mac version and temporally reduced their price from $149 to $99. I’ve downloaded the 30 day trial version and have been using it for a few days. I have to say there is much to like [...]

A couple of days ago Milia Campbell (TulipChain Photography and TulipChain flickr handle) pointed out to me that we should have a separate flickr group for HDR and Blending in real estate so that all the there would be a separate place to post and discuss HDR and Blended images. As you know if you’ve [...]

I  just discovered that HDRsoft announced Photomatix Light back on Dec 15, 2009. This slipped passed me because I’ve been depending on HDRsoft e-mails that announce new versions. I didn’t get one this time. Maybe it’s because I nitpicked the way the first version of their Lightroom plugin worked. I’ll be nice. What Photomatix Light [...]

In his article titled “A Plea for HDR” on Luminous-landscape.com Alexandre Buisse says “The technique (HDR) has indeed a very bad press, especially in the “fine art” community, and to be fair, much of the criticism is justified. But the point I would like to make here is that, well used, it can be very [...]