Is Darktable’s pipe ready for such a workflow, i.e. processing multiple exposures (bracketed or not) in the darkroom view? Relying on external tooling always feels a bit … brittle.
Yes. That thing here averages and normalizes the white point to 1.0 for all selected images:
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.
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Probably the easiest way to handle interior shots with exterior views is to illuminate the inside at daylight temp, so then you’re both raising the interior light level toward the exterior as well as making color temperature the same. If that’s impractical, two shots, one exposed/temped for inside, one exposed/temped for outside, and combine the two with masking.
Having a camera that’ll do HDR would be a help; my Z6 does decent two-exposure HDR to a JPEG, and will leave the two raw files if you tell it to.
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This is the biggest challenge with indoor/outdoor balance - it is not exposure, but that there will be a color temperature imbalance between outdoor lighting and typical indoor lighting. So even if you do manage to handle the dynamic range challenges, without manual editing, handling the difference in color temperature between indoor and outdoor lighting is going to be a challenge.
One solution some real estate photographers use is not to process a scene captured in non-optimal conditions, but instead to improve the lighting of the scene. Instead of relying on existing indoor light, bring a flash. Flashes are color balanced much closer to outdoor daylight than almost any indoor lighting. Strobist: Working Around the House gives some examples of handling the challenges of real estate photography lighting by improving the lighting scenario at the moment of capture.
It’s a lot easier to bring a flash and some light modifiers than to replace every bulb in the house with a daylight-balanced one.
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Thanks for all the replies, but I’m still confuse.
Is it better to take a HDR image or not?
Canon 90D with a Canon EF-S 10-18mm f/4,5-5.6 IS STM
Is it better to make this process and them edit the JPEG?
Thanks
Different white balances over the picture can be fixed piece-wise using color balance and, again, masks. Using the rasterized masks, you can share masks between modules, so if you already defined exposure masks to bring back windows, just reuse them in color balance and adjust the slope to match in and out lightings.
Even with daylight balanced flashes, you can’t escape it, since daylight varies between 4000 K and 7000 K depending on time and weather, while flashes are hard set to 5000-6000 K. Unless you are lucky (or use flash gels — which will be worse if ill-chosen), you will always have a white balance difference.
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Google Nathan Cool. Use a layered workflow. He uses photoshop but you could GIMP instead and maybe DT if you need to edit the raw files. He also provides info on how to take the shot… usually some flash and lighting is required for best results…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xmwr92n3GA
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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.
His results are bad, since he doesn’t respect the balance between in and out. His outdoors sky is darker than the indoors mid-tones. Bringing back highlights is fine, but inverting contrast and completely forgetting how indoors lighting connects to outdoors is unacceptable. Unless you are stuck in a dramatic storm, the sky is always brighter than anything else.
Marco Bucci has a very good set of videos about shading and values in painting, better start with that as a safety net before planning to be creative about lighting:
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Ha not that I would disagree at all but this is where the purist in you kicks in (not a bad thing)…I don’t think many of his clients give a rats ass about much of that …a punchy dynamic image is what he is after to draw the eye…I would image if you analysed magazine covers for all of these features they would fail miserably but they catch the eye…
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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.
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ReaL Estate is a game of smoke and mirrors so why not the photography…
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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)
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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:
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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.
@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
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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.
You know you can manually discard bad edges from the horizontal/vertical lines detection just by painting on UI preview with right click ?
Sounds like a bad alpha merging but needs investigation. You know you can send me samples.
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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.
Hi @anon41087856, first of all thank you for all the amazing work that you are doing!
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!
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.
I don’t know, could be 
Yeah, I didn’t want to bother anyone but thank you xD I’ll send you the samples.
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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.
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