Michael Freeman Revisits HDR

Michael Freeman, the author of Mastering High Dynamic Range Photography, takes another look at the HDR technique in this blog article: http://thefreemanview.com/techniques/hdr-revisited/

Mastering the Art of High Dynamic Range Photography has become one of the foremost reference books on this technique. However, Mr. Freeman had stopped using the technique several years ago, in favor of another multiple exposure technique, known as exposure fusion, with which he feels it is easier to achieve natural looking results than with the HDR/tonemapping process.

Mr. Freeman's article has some useful illustrations, and it reflects his disappointment with the multitude of poorly executed HDR images that one finds now all over the Web. Recently, I have been noticing quite a bit of poorly done HDR in low-budget marketing materials.

Adobe Lightroom's JPEG Compression Settings

Here is an interesting Web article regarding Adobe Lightroom's jpeg compression settings: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality

The article includes useful comparisons of the effect of different jpeg compression settings with different kinds of photos. One conclusion of the article is that one size does not fit all with regard to these settings. With the same setting, different photos can exhibit very different amounts of jpeg compression artifacts.

More Twilights

I love doing twilight shots. However, it is not often that conditions are ideal for these, in which case extra Photoshop work is required. The idea is to wait until the interior and exterior light is perfectly balanced.  However, often the interior lighting is very uneven, and elaborate supplemental interior lighting for these shots is often not in the budget for real estate photography. In addition, even when the sky is blue in real life, with the best overall balance, the sky may appear dull and greyish in a photo, so enhancement or replacement of the sky with Photoshop is required. For both of these photos, I replaced the sky. In the top photo, I also added a little supplementary lighting to the upstairs. In the bottom photo, the upper windows were not lit because I didn't have access to the attic, so I had to manufacture some light with Photoshop. With  both photos, I had to do some selective modification to the color and brightness of individual windows to balance them out, in addition to a variety of other retouching. It is partly because of this extra processing work that I charge more for these kinds of photos.