Thanks for the tips. 
I will practice and maybe share the result in a new play raw topic.
It seems that selecting ânoâ for âpreserve chrominanceâ in filmic makes a good difference.
The result could have been better without clipped highlights outside, and I think that opening the curtains could also help dealing with the window (I couldnât make the curtains as bright as Iâd like without brightening the background outside too much, and I couldnât darken the outside as Iâd like without darkening the curtains too much; maybe this could be solved tweaking the mask in tone equalizer, but with the curtains open we could just decrease the exposure outside a bit more). Blooming the highlights with filmic, using a fairly high transition value, also seems to help.
EDIT: And looking at the picture again, I think desaturating those highlights a bit more maybe could make it look more natural.
IMG_1612-hdr_04.dng.xmp (12.6 KB)
2 Likes
Google window pullsâŚthat is what you are trying to achieveâŚI think you might get better results if you use GIMPâŚhere is an exampleâŚits photoshop but this guy has a great channel for real estate photography and you could emulate most of the techniques in GIMP and he give tips on how to take the shots⌠Window Pulls for Real Estate Photography - YouTube there may be other examples on his site as will for how to shoot and processâŚ
2 Likes
Thanks for the tips. I will try this method too.
ART
The situation is not ideal to pull out some details from outside. The curtain is certainly not helping. I suspect there is a blue cast coming from outside which is not advantageous for an interior photo.
As @paperdigits and @s7habo suggested some light inside or an external flash could certainly improve the result and ease the postprocessing.
5 Likes
Incredible result ! I wonder if this could be achieved with dt too, but I have my doubts.
Thanks for the tips and for your approach.
Right⌠finally checked the files instead of just commenting :).
First off now I still got your attention:
I see in the metadata that you have a Canon 90d. Forget everything I said about doing it in one shot, that wonât work with a sensor like that. Shadows will be noisy.
The method still stands: Go as low and check every test show in something that shows raw clipping till you have the lowest exposure where highlights arenât clipped. Then go up in steps of +2ev (in your case). In theory, you already have all the highlights, so every extra shot you take helps in getting rid of shadow noise.
Second point: I would like the original files instead of these DNGs, because Photolab canât work on those :).
Anyway, Iâm no real estate photographer, but the comment âwonder if this could be archived with DT tooâ hit me, so I at least had to show how to handle the dynamic range.
This is done with only your lowest exposure shot. Itâs noisy as crazy because of that:
Basically, I started with a basic edit (ignoring the window) like this:
And then I added a tone-equalizer under the exposure module, where I lowered the highlights in a curve-like manner. It can only go to -2ev, so you can duplicate that tone-equalizer a few times depending on what you want:
Youâll notice that the left corner of the bed, and the little bag next to the âcircle blanketâ is quite dull (and you see the blue cast that @gaaned92 talked about very clearly on the floor between the blankets and the bed).
Those would be better left untouched (so the highlights nice and bright and maybe a bit clipped), it gives a nice contrasty look to the inside. But to reach that, youâll have to resort to masking (letting the tone-equalizers work only on the window portion) and I didnât have the patience to do that properly now.
I added a warming-lut (well, actually Nik Effectâs âskylightâ effect at 20%) to give the same color vibe as @gaaned92.
I did another attempt after thinking about the âdullnessâ to tweak some other parameters of the tone-equalizer, and this I got in two different curves with some ânegative maskingâ on the parts I want to stay a bit brighter:
(edit: I notice the haloing at the bottom of the window. I shouldnât have touched those settings, the defaults were fine as they were :P)
Not saying any of this is perfect, but just to show that it doesnât have to be difficult to get in the ballpark.
And Iâll attach the xmp 
IMG_1614.dng.xmp (161.2 KB)
1 Like
Having done some real estate shoots I can confirm this sucks. Itâs also not always fixable in post. I have lost time chasing that rabbit and the best answer ends up being - just buy daylight balanced lightbulbs and bring them with you to replace lights. I had a bag of daylight bulbs just for this and the extra 10 minutes to go around replacing lightbulbs made post work so much easier⌠
4 Likes
I have to say Rawtherapee local edits using the warm cool and saturation tools really works quite well for this issue.
sorry, no play from my sideâŚ
on my Windows 10-Computer RawTherapee shuts down, when trying to load these dng-filesâŚ
Version: 5.8-3015-g35e6a0e40
Branch: dev
Commit: 35e6a0e40
Commit date: 2021-08-06
Should be fixed.
2 Likes
wow, such quicklyâŚi am not yet finished with opening an issue on github ⌠
Edit: ok i should read more carefully on github, before opening an issue.
1 Like
@heckflosse is a quick one at fixing and optimizing. 
1 Like
IMG_1612-hdr-1.jpg.out.pp3 (22.9 KB)
Confirmed. RawTherapee_dev_5.8-3046 from https://keybase.pub/gaaned92/RTW64NightlyBuilds/
1 Like
@chaimav HDR greasy.
I am not sure what the term âgreasyâ means, but I assume that you mean it looks too over the top with the HDR?
How is this one? I had the saturation cranked up too high in the first one.
IMG_1612-hdr-2.jpg.out.pp3 (22.9 KB)
You may not need to use mulitple exposures. I grabbed the darkest image (IMG_1614.dng). This is shot at ISO 400, f/23. You can get 4x as much light onto the sensor by changing that to ISO 100, f/11. This will give you almost the same shutter speed and exposure levels in thge raw, but you have 2x less photon shot-noise in the image and the reduced sensor gain will likely benefit both noise and dynamic range in the camera.
This is a render from an experimental processing path (open IMG_1614.dng in Photoflow, white balance off the drawers, apply noise reduction, apply +4.3 stops exposure, then render the resulting scene-linear data using Open Display Transform to generate sRGB data:
The shadows are noisy if you pixel-peep the 2048x2048 image, but that may or may not be a problem depending on what you want to do with the result (and you may be able to reduce the noise anyway by changing the exposure settings).
2 Likes