pdsilen Loc: Roswell, New Mexico

I just did a shoot for a family friend who's selling their house by owner. to post in the real estate flyer. So, I set my my camera to -3 0 +3. Needless to say developing them has been a challenge. A common problem I'm having with most of them is that there is a blue hue on the shadows. And I don't know what to do to correct it. I've tried everything. I'm open to any ideas.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

That is a really extreme bracket for most circumstances. Esp when only doing two shots. That is 6 stops between the two. Or did you also do a '0' shot?

A three shot or 5 shot HDR with 1 or 2 stops per step would probably produce better results.

pdsilen Loc: Roswell, New Mexico

Thank you very much. I'll remember that.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

This google search result gives a wide selection of sources for using HDR in Real Estate photography:

https://www.google.com/search?q=hdr+for+real+estate&oq=HDR+for+realestate&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l5.12447j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

This one seems to cover it all in a good way.

https://www.hdrsoft.com/real-estate/photographing-interiors-with-hdr-simple-technique.html

I am not a real estate photographer but a retired guy with lots of time and will research and try many types of photography when I get tired of birds, butterflies, flowers, trains and macro.

johnhjacobs

Robert's suggestion of 3-5 shots at 1 or 2 EV is appropriate. HDR over extreme EV ranges is usually only needed with you have extremely bright light and very dark shadows. Correcting the blue (more likely purple) can often done by doing a selective desaturation of purple. How to do this depends on your software. I use Adobe Photoshop and HDRsoft Photomatix for HDR. Both can selectively desaturate a color.

Another thing that might help would be to pre-process your individual RAW files and apply lens corrections; if you have correct EXIF data automatic corrects can probably be applied. This will sometimes get rid of the corner issues and it will straighten up distortion. In the case of real estate photography you can get an HDR like effect on a single 0 EV shot using most RAW editors. In Photoshop you can add some dehaze, increase clarity, reduce contrast, increase shadows, lower black point, and increase vibrance and sometimes saturation, especially if you want to selectively reduce purple.

Finally, another simple way to deal with corner issues is to shoot a little wider and then crop. I hope this helps a bit.

rwilson1942 Loc: Houston, TX

Blue shadows sounds more like a color balance problem than a bracketing problem.
Are you using auto color balance or selecting one?

pdsilen Loc: Roswell, New Mexico

Thank you. That is really helpful.

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

Some people have been successful making HDR real estate images. I am retired, recently, as a real estate photographer and in my opinion using a flash was a higher quality image. Run and gunners seem to like HDR better. I don't think -3 0 and +3 is a good set. You'll have to experiment.

cameraf4 Loc: Delaware

Confused here. Did you use film or digital? Can't imagine why anyone would bracket with digital since all cameras will get your exposure in the ballpark and you can certainly exposure/color correct in post.

khorinek

Agree. I shoot HDR with -1, 0 +1.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Probably the original poster was shooting interiors with windows... where it's difficult to balance the indoor illumination with the very bright scene outdoors.

If you want the interior shots to be well-balanced with the outdoor view you have two choices....

1. Increase the lighting indoors to bring it up to the same level as outdoors. Ideally you also should change the type of lighting so that it has a color temp comparable to outdoors (approx. 5000K on a sunny day). This was pretty much a necessity when we were shooting film. It meant a van full of lighting gear equipment and could take hours to properly set up for a shot of one room.

2. With digital we now have an alternative. Take multiple exposures - one or more for indoors and one or more for outdoors - then combine the "correct" portions from each into a single image. With digital you can easily change the exposure AND the white balance for each. There are various ways to combine the images, too.... HDR software might automate it, but can look "overdone" very easily. Personally I usually just use Photoshop layers and masks and combine images manually. Usually I only need to take two images. (Note: It was possible to do multi-exposure with film, too... but combining the two images was a difficult process beyond the capabilities of most photographers.)

Sometimes I'll even use a single image that's been double processed. It's not a real estate shot, but the exact same technique was used in this example, where the subjects were in motion so only a single shot was possible. There's no way to use a filter and it's impossible to change out the lighting. For several reasons, a flash is inadvisable too. So I simply took a single shot, made a copy of it the post-processed the two images differently... one adjusted for the indoor light levels and color... then, in order to recover some of the background outdoors, the second got adjusted exposure levels and color temp/tint for the bright sunlight outdoors. The image on the right is the final combination of the two images, done using Photoshop's layers and masks.



Note: This image has a slight boost in saturation to accommodate a printing process that was going to be used. Also, I felt it ended up a little too strong and dialed back the background slightly in the final image (simply by reducing the opacity of the layer).

It's usually even faster and easier to do this type of adjustment with real estate interiors. There you can put your camera on a tripod and make two shots: One for the interior light levels, then a second for the much brighter scene outdoors. The indoor portion of the second shot is often heavily under-exposed and goes completely black. This makes it easy to use a fast selection tool like "magic want", invert the selection and make a copy layer that only "sees" the brightest areas, which you then overlay on the first shot that was done with exposure/color temp for the interior. The hardest part is aligning everything. But so long as you use a tripod and don't change anything other than the exposure/color temp, even that only takes a few seconds to do. In fact, it probably took longer to write or read this paragraph, than it typically takes to combine two shots this way.

I don't use the camera's bracketing capabilities and there's no "standard" setting that can be used in all situations. Only two images are needed and it's easy to calculate more precise exposures (I usually only vary the shutter speed and never use Auto ISO for this). If I were doing a lot of it today, I'd invest in one of the full frame mirrorless cameras for their Electronic Viewfinder, where you can see a fairly accurate preview of the exposure you're making, making it possible to very quickly acquire the necessary images. The mirrorless camera would be a time saver.

pdsilen, by all means try HDR... but you might find the automation doesn't accomplish what you want. Depending upon what software you have, there may be other, easier ways. It would help if you attached some sample images (both before and after examples) and gave us some idea what software you were using.

Bill Munny Loc: Aurora, Colorado

Go to the HDR section of this site, give the same data and you might get a much more detailed and accurate response.

1DProphet

Curves panel, in blue channel move color eye dropper around your black trouble areas from darkest black to lighter shadow area with color cast, as you move you’ll see a indicator move on the curves display also, when you get to the point in black area which is the lightest shadow you have a noticeable blue presence click and place a couple of fixed points on the diagonal line, then grab the shadow side of those marks and drag it down, try moving your end point to the right a bit, the points you set limit your adjustments to shadows only and won’t globally change your blues, lots of color science here but curves lets you do what all those color sliders adjust in one place in a very targeted manner.

dwermske

I didn't see which program you are using. I think this might be something called "fringing". I have a number of programs that perform HDR photo stacking and they all have an option to "de-fring" which removes the blueish glow from around the edges. It could also be that the alignment of the photo stack is slightly off. Your HDR software should also have an option to insure exact alignment.