Mastering HDR Photography through bracketing: Guide to Real estate HDR
Jan 18, 2023
In real estate photo shooting, even experienced photographers face some sort of difficulties with lighting and shadow. Thus, HDR photography is an appropriate and beneficial solution to overcome such limitations. In general, High Dynamic Range photography allows photographers to capture necessary data and details of the scene.
Diving into the world of Real estate HDR photography, this kind of shooting and editing helps photography companies save time and money. Leveraging bracketing photography, real estate photographers can effortlessly deliver high-quality photoshoots for interior and exterior photos.
From dynamic range photography to High dynamic range photography
When it comes to real estate photography, the first impression of property photos is the key. However, how does HDR photo editing make a difference in photo quality? Let’s get started with the concept.
1. Concept of dynamic range photography in real estate
Dynamic range photography specializes in the ranges between the Highline and Shadow expressed in a photo. In other words, Dynamic Ranges measure lighting intensities captured by the camera. As you might know, human eyes record a wider range of lighting intensities than a camera can. That’s why some of the scene details can be disappeared in the photo, leading to poor photography results.
Technically, as explained with the histogram, a high dynamic range image shows a high natural contrast in luminosity. Low Dynamic Range photos, on the other hand, have exposure values in a limited spread within the histogram.
In Real Estate, photographers find it hard to set up exposure to capture the best-looking scene due to the nature of each property. Shooting interiors might suffer from defective conditions where there’s a huge dynamic range of the room shadow and the outside lighting shines through the window. Or, in most cases, the ambient light in interior shooting cannot be fully captured by the camera. Similar to exterior shooting, the contrast of lighting from the sky and the dark side of your garden might cause an upset in setting up appropriate exposure.
2. Real estate HDR photography in real-life
Lately, the innovation in real estate photo editing has made High dynamic range photography more natural and accessible. The current HDR photo is expected to enhance the textures by balancing the bright and dark sides.
HDR photography presents the process or method of photo post-production for high dynamic range images. This approach reduces the stressful task for photographers in choosing proper exposure in the shooting process. You can take multiple images for a single screen in different exposure settings. Then, HDR photo editing will help to bracket those raw into the final image.
It raises concerns about how many exposures should be ideal for real estate photography. You might or might not know this, but you can create an HDR image with only a single exposure setting, like how do on your phone camera. In real estate shooting, bracketing photography for HDR commonly take from 3 to 9 ambient exposures. Our experts recommend using 5 shots to produce an optimal HDR image.
Innovation in professional HDR photo editing
Throughout time, both the shooting and editing sides of HDR photography are constantly developing. However, there is no global standard but expert recommendations. That’s why you can find diverse online resources. And some of those show a different approach.
1. Clearing the shooting approach for HDR bracketing
As mentioned below, photographers need to adopt a shooting method called bracketing by adopting HDR photo editing. You might hear about two types of bracketing techniques in photography, which are Focus Bracketing and Exposure bracketing.
Focus bracketing: specialize in capturing identical images with different focus points.
Exposure bracketing: specialize in capturing identical images with different exposure settings.
In Real Estate HDR photography, exposure bracketing is commonly used as it helps photographers solve the problem with lighting. Diving into shooting technique, we prepare a comprehensive guideline for photographers approaching HDR photography, showing in detail how to prepare gear and camera for shooting 5 ambient bracketings.
2. HDR photography roadmap in property shooting: The history
As HDR photography is highly influenced by the innovation of editing software, many people believe that HDR photography is a recent result of the digital age. But the story of HDR photography occurred earlier than you could imagine. Gustave Le Gray was the first photographer to start his first example. In dealing with the extreme contrast between the sea and the sky, he decided to take 2 shots. He combined those into one composite. It was the first example of HDR images.
It can be said that the very first application of HDR in shooting landscape. But currently, it has commonly applied in many industries, especially the real estate industry, when the demand for photo editing services increases.
The current peak in the development of HDR photography attaches to the booming of photo editing tools, which help photos extend the tonal range. Additionally, the innovation of camera and CPU power makes HDR image processing become accessible. Even a single exposure image could generate the Real estate HDR image without post-processing.
However, HDR bracketing has never been solely about software but the capability of making a photo better. It is more about expertise and scalability. It is one of the typical myths about HDR photography that you can check our article to explore the remains.
Key takeaways
Real estate HDR photography can take time to master. We prepare this series (including 6 unique blogs) to help you form in-depth knowledge in this part of photography:
HDR photo editing provides solutions for controlling the ranges between the Highline and Shadow.
HDR photography is not solely for landscape shoots. It applies widely in Real estate and property shooting.
We suggest shooting 5 ambient exposures for bracketing to ideal HDR images. Your final exposure setting should have the following values: -4, -2, 0, +2, +4
Do not let misconceptions about HDR photography deter you from going for it. HDR bracketing photography deserves to be mass-applied due to its undoubted tangle benefits.
