How to shoot and edit real estate photos

[anon41087856]

Well, when a painter manages to get more realistic lighting than an actual photographer, it’s rather bad news, whether the clients care or not.

[priort (Todd Prior)]

ReaL Estate is a game of smoke and mirrors so why not the photography…

[agriggio (Alberto)]

Hi,
You might want to take another look at hdrmerge – maybe you will find out that it does the right thing™ (i.e merge in linear, by normalizing the exposures and taking the max signal that is not clipped)

[KristijanZic]

I’ve done these a few days ago with a Canon 77D and Canon EF-S 10-18mm using multiple exposures (like at least 5).

I’m so sorry to say to you that you won’t be able to do this in any opensource software, at least not in any reasonable amount of time spent on editing.

1st of all, you won’t be able to merge HDRs easily, and in my experience I get green fringing and artefacts around clipped areas from any image.

2ndly, perspective correction often does a sub par job correcting and there is no option to manually add vectors in Darktable so that’s a hit or miss. (good luck doing it with sliders)

3ly There’s no raster brush masking tool with edge detection, so again, I’m sorry to say but you can potentially spend hours tweaking the masks in Darktable that could easily be painted with a brush that has edge detection.

That said, Darktable is better than Lightroom in everything else, just not what you currently need. I’m using it more and more but I really hope that DT one day gets a good way of merging images into HDR dng-s, a raster paint brush masking tool with edge detection and a marginally better perspective correction module (where you could draw the lines yourself).

I’ve tried to do these in Darktable but as I was nearing the deadline I just had to do it in Lightroom and be done with it:

[MarcoNex]

@anon41087856

The only thing it doesn’t do is correcting pixel shifting if any (so, use a tripod in “mirror up” mode). But it’s stupid simple, and as such, entirely color safe.

It would be very nice to have the alignment feature too. In poor light, I often shoot burst handheld at very high ISO and stack them using Hugin.

[Claes]

@42578 I just have a feeling that you are either making things too complicated, or that you are approaching the subject from the wrong angle…

Suggestion: duckduckgo for real estate photography and look for what presently is à la vogue. Analyze those photos.

• What makes them “good”?
• What makes them “stand out”.
• What makes them “sell” the property to the new owners?

Then: try to copy those photos using your own home.
How to “develop” them is just a subset of the total chain.

Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden

[anon41087856]

@KristijanZic

There’s no raster brush masking tool with edge detection, so again, I’m sorry to say but you can potentially spend hours tweaking the masks in Darktable that could easily be painted with a brush that has edge detection.

You don’t need raster brush for that, and I don’t know any brush with edge detection built-in. Use a regular polygon vector mask and increase the mask feathering by a lot.

@KristijanZic

2ndly, perspective correction often does a sub par job correcting and there is no option to manually add vectors in Darktable so that’s a hit or miss. (good luck doing it with sliders)

You know you can manually discard bad edges from the horizontal/vertical lines detection just by painting on UI preview with right click ?

@KristijanZic

1st of all, you won’t be able to merge HDRs easily, and in my experience I get green fringing and artefacts around clipped areas from any image.

Sounds like a bad alpha merging but needs investigation. You know you can send me samples.

[Entropy512 (Andy Dodd)]

@matze

Works like a charm, thanks Aurelien! I was always under the impression I had to bracket but yes, thinking about it that is exactly what phones are doing nowadays as well if I remember correctly.

Phones are using what Aurelien has routinely described as “pixel garbage”.

So when listening to him, keep in mind that products which win awards such as “Best Smartphone Camera” such as Google’s Pixel family are “pixel garbage”. Engadget is part of the Yahoo family of brands

As Todd has pointed out, real estate photography is about marketing, and marketing is rarely about realism. That is why aggressive dynamic range compression and local tonemapping is standard practice in real estate photography nowadays.

[KristijanZic]

Hi @anon41087856, first of all thank you for all the amazing work that you are doing!

@anon41087856

You don’t need raster brush for that, and I don’t know any brush with edge detection built-in. Use a regular polygon vector mask and increase the mask feathering by a lot.

Believe me, you do and Lightroom has one. I’ll try to create one of these edits in Darktable with your suggestion and possibly make a video to illustrate the problems etc. If I succeed with polygon vector masks then weee!

@anon41087856

You know you can manually discard bad edges from the horizontal/vertical lines detection just by painting on UI preview with right click ?

Yes, but you cannot ever get a line that you want, only what the algo gives you. Again it’s time consuming to do trial and error by painting out different edges. If you had just 3-4 lines that you can position however you want and correct if not satisfied that would be much better. I’ll probably open a feature request for that one.

@anon41087856

Sounds like a bad alpha merging but needs investigation. You know you can send me samples.

I don’t know, could be Yeah, I didn’t want to bother anyone but thank you xD I’ll send you the samples.

[KristijanZic]

@Entropy512

As Todd has pointed out, real estate photography is about marketing, and marketing is rarely about realism. That is why aggressive dynamic range compression and local tonemapping is standard practice in real estate photography nowadays.

Man, I’ve shoot real estate where I’ve had to dismantle the bed and bring into another bedroom to shoot lol. When guests arrive they have one bed and a two of those inflatable mattresses just thrown on the floor in the other rooms. But yeah, the most important thing is to fake everything, the lights, the amount of space, the vibrance, whatever you can to get the ppl to book.

[ggbutcher (Glenn Butcher)]

@42578

Is it better to make this process and them edit the JPEG?

If you have a need for quick-turnaround, getting it done in-camera would be fastest. You’ll have more control over the post-processing alternative, but at the expense of time on the computer and all the attendant file transfer.

[Entropy512 (Andy Dodd)]

@KristijanZic

@Entropy512

As Todd has pointed out, real estate photography is about marketing, and marketing is rarely about realism. That is why aggressive dynamic range compression and local tonemapping is standard practice in real estate photography nowadays.

Man, I’ve shoot real estate where I’ve had to dismantle the bed and bring it to another bedroom to shoot lol. When guests arrive they have one bed and a two of those inflatable mattresses just thrown on the floor in the other rooms. But yeah, the most important thing is to fake everything, the lights, the amount of space, the vibrance, whatever you can to get the ppl to book.

It sounds like you’ve shot for AirBNB or Vrbo owners.

If you look through AirBNB listings or VRBO listings, aggressive tonemapping that Aurelien declares to be garbage is standard operating practice. Anyone who uses global tonemapping alone to meet his purist worldview will have listings that look bland and lifeless and won’t get many bookings unless everything else is full-up.

You make a good point that AirBNB and VRBO owners do sometimes go too far - like hiding the fact that the common room in their “sleeps 6” listing has seating for two, and the only televisions are in the bedrooms. But creative lighting to the point of being unrealistic - again, that’s SOP in that industry and adopting the purist view will lead to you failing.

[MarcoNex]

@anon41087856

@KristijanZic

There’s no raster brush masking tool with edge detection, so again, I’m sorry to say but you can potentially spend hours tweaking the masks in Darktable that could easily be painted with a brush that has edge detection.

You don’t need raster brush for that, and I don’t know any brush with edge detection built-in. Use a regular polygon vector mask and increase the mask feathering by a lot.

Well, I remember some years ago we were all in awe with the control points of Nik Collection, masking made easy…
DT mask feathering is very similar to control points, actually better in most cases.
I don’t feel the need of a brush with edge detection, while I do feel the lack of a flow control in the brush, meaning multiple strokes to progressively add opacity

[afre (Alan)]

@KristijanZic

I’ve done these a few days ago with a Canon 77D and Canon EF-S 10-18mm using multiple exposures (like at least 5).

Thanks for sharing.

---

General thoughts

Similar to what @Claes said. You need to step back for a moment and decide what your (and your client’s) goals are and determine what your time, gear, resource (assistants and otherwise) and skill budgets are. In general, you want something that is clean in appearance and clear in expression. If at any point your workflow isn’t comfortable or too complicated, I think it would show in the final product. In other words, keep it simple but also try new things.

[KristijanZic]

@42578

Canon 90D with a Canon EF-S 10-18mm f/4,5-5.6 IS STM

Actually, you can’t do anything really with Darktable. That’s another frustrating thing at the moment, probably the biggest one… Canon EOS 90D uses CR3 format to save raw data and that’s unsupported by Exiv2 library that DT uses to read raw files.

Read more at this link (or better don’t, it’s depressing):

Canon CR3 raw support - your move

Yes, obviously it’s neither a good idea to prevent anyone from voicing their opinion nor am I in any opinion of enforcing anything here if it were a good idea. I still stand by my statement that you should not talk about forking unless you mean it (and know what it means), otherwise you are making a fool of yourself. Again, if you want to do that, be my guest. Anyway that was not the important part of my post, the part about that I don’t see that anyone is blocking this feature is (should have s…

[Entropy512 (Andy Dodd)]

Well, you COULD use DNG Converter followed by your processing method of choice. But yeah, CR3 does complicate things significantly. I’m not sure if HDRMerge has basic CR3 support. (RawTherapee has CR3 image data support but not metadata.)

[anon41087856]

@Entropy512

Phones are using what Aurelien has routinely described as “pixel garbage”.

So when listening to him, keep in mind that products which win awards such as “Best Smartphone Camera” such as Google’s Pixel family are “pixel garbage”. Engadget is part of the Yahoo family of brands

Whatever you say dude. I deliver hand-taylored pictures, not products made by automatic award winning shit behind my back, which may or may not clip gamut in unacceptable ways cause tone-mapping bros didn’t quite get the fact that gamut-mapping is the other side of the tone-mapping coin.

Remember when I said tone mapping should be applied in pipe after optical effects ? One year after, award-winning Google Pixel posted a blog post to say they tried that and it was better, so they changed it.

So I will keep trusting my eyes as for what is good or shit, and keep doing physics instead of color bullshit in display-referred madness world, thank you very much.

[anon41087856]

@KristijanZic

I don’t know, could be Yeah, I didn’t want to bother anyone but thank you xD I’ll send you the samples.

I took a more precise look at dt’s HDR merging (actually, we could call it just merging), and the problem could be that the raw files are merged non-demosaiced. So, if your images are not pixel-perfect aligned, that could explain why you get fringes. Perhaps the merging should happen a bit later in the pipe, but then the dark current offset (black raw point) will get in the way for different side-effects.

[afre (Alan)]

I find the (pre-master) HDR or tone mapping capabilities lacking and limiting. Perhaps master has more to offer now…?

[42578]

Thank you all for the tips and guidelines.

I will practice and in the future (I think in a close future ) I will post some of my results in this topic for you guys take a look.

Thanks again.