Photography For Real Estate

First of all I want to clarify my description, in yesterdays post, of how the round trip process between Lightroom and Photomatix 3.1Beta works. When you send a group of images from Lightroom to Photomatix 3.1Beta (using the new Photomatix export plugin) Photomatix 3.1Beta does have a feature that will re-import the final processed image […]

I’m glad to see that the 3.1 version of Photomatix has added a Lightroom export plugin. Photomatix 3.1 is still in Beta. I’ve been using the Beta 8 version of Photomatix for several days and I like being able to use Photomatix from Lightroom.
The only downside that I’ve found to the current export plugin is […]

Tim Armes recently announced his latest version of Lightroom/Enfuse 3.0. For those of you that are not familiar with LR/Enfuse take a look at my post back in March of this year on LR/Enfuse. In summary, LR/Enfuse is a Lightroom plug-in that provides a convenient interface onto the open source Enfuse application, which provides […]

I wanted to highlight the PFRE flicker discussion thread that Jeremy Esland started explaining his experiments with Tufuse Pro. If you’ve been using any of the Enfuse/Tufuse products I think you will find Jeremy’s experiments very useful.
Thanks Jeremy for describing your experiments with Tufuse Pro.

I’d like to synthesize and distill the information and discussions about how to approach using HDR for real estate photography.
First of all it is important to look a lot of real estate images and refine your ability to see subtle differences styles and lighting.
Next I think you must always be working to prevent committing the […]

VRMAG has an interesting article by Michel Thoby, a well known panographer, experimenting with Enfuse for Night Photography. I point this article out not so much for the VR aspects but for the subject of using Enfuse for real estate still photography. Michel reports that:
“ I have read and I have myself written about the […]

eSiteTours.com is a full service tour company in Bellevue, WA that launched at the end of 2007. I did a post on eSiteTours.com when they launched. eSiteTours specializes in HDR images for both their 360s and still shots.
Matt Edington is one of the eSiteTours founders and currently does all their HDR processing. Recently Matt was […]

It’s worth noting that both version 3 of Photomatix Pro and version 7.8 of PTgui Pro now both support exposure fusion.
I think this is significant particularly to real estate photographers because exposure fusion, I find, can give most of the benefits of HDR processing in a faster work flow. Sure, you can probably do better […]

danjryan in the flickr discussion group points out an interesting little HDR tutorial over at abduzeedo.com.
HDR topics are some of the most popular subjects these days. And I can understand why if done well HDR techniques can save time and equipment costs when shooting interiors, which in real estate photography is important. However, the crux […]

I’ve been reading Christian Bloch’s book, The HDRI Handbook, and finding it useful in learning HDR processing. Christian is a visual effects artist who works in Hollywood and has created effects for TV shows StarTrek, Invasion, Lost, as well as several movies. Christian’s book has a companion site at: www.hdrlabs.com/book. This site has some good […]

I did a shoot this weekend of a new listing we have and decided to use both my usual lighting technique (primarily on camera flash) and Enfuse and use what ever worked the best. It turned out not to be much contest; I like the Enfuse results best. Here are a sequence of photos that […]

I had an interesting time this weekend shooting the same property that I’d shot back in 2004. The property is a funky little A-Frame on a remote lane on Tiger Mt near Issaquah, WA. My wife Levi has sold almost every home on this lane over the last 5 years.

I wanted to point out that for those interested in an introduction to HDR (High Dynamic Range) Alex Linsey has created a nice little introduction video to HDR software and processing. You can download it or get it as a podcast via iTunes.

As reported over at Lightroom News, Timothy Armes has a new donation-ware image blending plugin for Lightroom that creates images similar to tonemapped images.
I purchased a copy and have been playing around with it for several hours. It is very convenient to use, just select the images you want to blend in Lightroom and launch […]

Alan Cole recently left a comment on a HDR post that I did last December where he left a link to a tutorial that describes his technique for doing HDR for his real estate photography. I thought it was interesting enough to post where more people will see it.