Flambient Real Estate Photography Basics

hey everyone mike brick here with inside realestatephotography.com and in this video we're going to get into the fundamental principles of the flambian or flash method for shooting real estate photography including the gear you'll need camera and flash settings and also a demonstration on how to shoot and edit your images [Music] so as you may already know the two most popular methods for shooting real estate photography are hdr and a method that most people call flambian the term flambian is simply the words flash and ambien put together and the name simply refers to the process of taking a flash frame and an ambient or non-flash frame and blending those together later in editing to create the final image so in this video we're going to be diving into the flambean method and talking about incorporating a light into your real estate photography as opposed to the hdr method which relies solely on available light i've already outlined the hdr method in another video titled real estate photography basics i will link to that video up on the screen right now if you haven't seen that video already and you're new to real estate photography i would recommend watching that first as it covers some essential things such as shock composition and other basic principles of real estate photography that i will not be getting into in this video [Music] so let's talk about the gear you'll need to shoot flash real estate photography in addition to your basic photography setup of camera lens tripod and remote shutter trigger if you're interested in what i recommend for that basic photography setup again that's something i cover in the real estate photography basics video so please have a look at that video if you haven't done so already so what you'll need to shoot flambeiant in addition to that basic photography setup is a light something preferably stronger than just a speed light a flash trigger a light stand and also a reflector i will link to all this gear down in the description below so first let's talk about lights could you get away with using just a speed light yes you could but the problem is it's not going to be powerful enough for a sizeable room or a room with a lot of ambient light coming in it would work just fine for a small bathroom or a small bedroom but once you get into a bigger room like a living room it's going to struggle even on full power you could of course do multiple flash pops with it around the room and composite those together later to get the desired result but that just makes more work for you and more time on site shooting and more time editing so my light of choice these days is the godox ad200 pro but the ad200 pro version works great as well and it's not all that expensive it's significantly more powerful than a speed light yet it's still somewhat compact and it works great in most situations even with this light sometimes i'm doing multiple flash pops in larger rooms when needed so i'm personally using this round head for it which is an additional expense as opposed to the rectangular fresnel head the fresnel head does do the job but i just don't prefer the way it bounces and spreads its light off the ceiling the round head has a much nicer and pleasing quality of light to me in my opinion i've also attached a pistol grip to it and also a sling strap to sling it over my shoulder which enables me to have my hands free and move my tripod around from shot to shot with ease now let's talk about the flash trigger the trigger mounts onto the hot shoe of your camera and allows the camera to communicate and remotely fire the flash that you're using it also allows you to control the power or intensity of the light which you'll need to do depending on the size of the room that you're shooting i'm using the godox x-pro s trigger for sony cameras now something i want to mention is that these godox triggers are known to cause white balance issues in manual mode which is how we will be using them you will get an overly warm temperature image at times long story short there are pins on the bottom of the trigger that communicate information to the camera that are really there for the flash's ttl mode but for whatever reason when in manual mode it screws up the white balance this is a known hardware issue with these triggers i personally deal with this issue by just correcting any color issues and editing as you'll see later demonstrated in this video i have heard though that people have found a workaround to this by buying the godox trigger for a different brand of camera for instance if you own a sony camera then buy the canon trigger that way the only pin on the trigger that will line up with the hot shoe on your camera is the one that tells the flash to fire thereby eliminating any of these white balance issues next let's talk about the light stand and the reflector 98 of the time you're not gonna need these things but just keep them in the trunk of your car so you can pull them out whenever you might need them as i mentioned earlier i carry my light around with a sling strap around my body so i do not put it on the light stand this just makes things quicker and easier and i always aim to be as efficient and stripped down with my gear as humanly possible the only time i'm putting my light on a light stand and using the reflector is when i go into a house and there are rooms with ceilings that are wood or painted a dark color or painted any other color but white really the reason being is that we're typically bouncing our flash off a white ceiling and using it as a giant reflector to fill the room with light we can't do that if the ceiling is a dark color because the dark color will absorb the light and if we do get any sort of bounce it will have a color cast to it and we definitely don't want that either so in those situations i would just put the light on a light stand and hold up the white side of the reflector name the light back towards that and bounce it off of there you don't need anything special as far as a light stand or reflector go and as with all the gear i'm mentioning in this video i will link to the ones i recommend down in the description below [Music] so now that we have all the gear in order let's talk about how to set up our camera and flash to do flambe and real estate photography first let's do our camera settings first we want to set our camera to manual mode because we want to control every parameter of exposure independently next i'm going to set my aperture to f 7.1 you can really get away with anything between f 5.6 and f 8. shooting with a wide-angle lens you'll be fine with anything within that range you may have to change your aperture from time to time but i find that leaving it set on f 7.1 is usually sufficient the reason for choosing an aperture in that range is so that we can keep our shutter speed within the appropriate area for our flash next i'm going to set our iso to 400 and as far as shutter speed goes that is the parameter that we will be adjusting on site from shot to shot to get our exposure where we want it now we're going to go into the camera menu and set a few more things first i'm going to set the camera to shoot raw images not jpegs next i'm going to go to drive mode and set my camera to just shoot one single frame we're not shooting any bracketed images for this type of photography like we are with hdr next i'm going to set my white balance to auto white balance and then i'm going to go into my auto focus settings and set it on wide okay now that our camera's set up let's set up our light and remote trigger first thing we want to do is make sure our trigger and our light are set on the same channel now whatever group our flash is set on we want to go to that corresponding group on our trigger and make sure it's set to manual because we'll be manually controlling our flash power great so now that we have all our settings squared away let me take you on site to a shoot and demonstrate the basic process of shooting a flambean image for real estate photography [Music] alright guys so here we are on-site out of shoot and i'm going to take you through the basic process of shooting a flambean image so my camera and tripod are already leveled my shot is composed already my camera is in the proper position i'm not going to go through all that stuff that's something i do go through in the real estate photography basics video which i've already mentioned in this video so check that video out if you're interested in all that so the first thing we want to do is get our ambient shot so we want to make sure our flash trigger is off so that's not interfering i have my histogram up on the screen so and i just want to adjust my shutter speed until my histogram is somewhere center to right of center we want a nice bright exposure here pretty much for the ambient shot and also we are shooting raw images so we do have some flexibility here with the exposure if we need to adjust it a little bit later in post so that's also the benefit of shooting raw for these right around 1 6th of a second i like that we're gonna go with that for the ambient shot so i'm going to fire this shot off [Music] alright cool so now we have our ambient shot done so now we want to take our flash shot so for the flash shot we want to raise our shutter speed which will decrease our exposure i know that's somewhat confusing but we want to raise our shutter speed about two stops so most shutter speed clicks on the wheel are third increments so we want to take it about six seven stops i'm gonna go six here and see what we got one two three four five six all right so that brings us up to one 125th of a second and now we want to turn our flash trigger on for our flash shot so once we turn that on so we have a lofted ceiling here again we have these big bright windows so we have a lot of ambient light coming in that we're gonna have to battle here i know that i'm gonna need a decent amount of flash power here for this so i'm gonna start at a half power and see where that takes me all right so i have the flash trigger now set at half power and we're going to fire off a shot here and see what we got so i'm just going to take this off and what we do here is basically we're just going to point our flash straight up at the ceiling and fire off a shot all right so you can see like at the k on the couch and everything on the floor that the flash did overpower most of the ambient light here but i think we can go a little bit more powerful here than a half i'm just gonna take it up to a half point seven and let's fire off another shot on that power and see what we got all right so now we have our our new one here at point half power 0.7 versus half power yeah i like that that should work good for what we need what we need it for so we have this overhang over here so we're not getting much flash under that since we're flashing in this section of the room this is a scenario where i mentioned earlier taking multiple flash pops so i'm going to pop one over there at about a quarter power so i'm going to adjust this to a quarter i'm just going to go over here and pop off a shot for that all right so there you see the quarter power shot over in that section just to light that up and we can composite that together with our other flash shot and then again with our ambient shot later so now we have that lit up with the flash so we took care of any ambient light over there as well so now the next thing we need to do is we need to expose for our windows because we're going to do a window pull here so how we do that is we're going to turn the flash trigger back off here so it's not affecting our shot and now i'm just gonna bring our shutter speed up until we have an exposure that we like for our windows about there is good so before i turn my flashback on i'm going to fire off just a shot of our windows like this uh this is just in case like we get any glare on our windows when we do turn our flash on this is just a backup layer we most of the time we don't using these but it's good to do this just in case so you can fix any glares or any imperfections once you do a flash shot out of your windows i'm gonna fire that shot off [Music] i'm gonna turn my flash back on and i'm gonna take it back up to it probably about the same a half point seven maybe again and the trick here is we wanna overexpose around the window area so when we take it into editing later in photoshop we can use darken mode as a blend mode and we'll be able to just blend our window view right in very easily you'll see that next in the editing section so what you want to do for that is point your flash directly at the windows that you're using that you're shooting and over expose them it's preferably at an angle so you're not getting any glare from the flash so i'm angled already here so i'm going to fire this shut off and over expose this whole area all right so here you can see now we have a whole overexposed this whole wall here around the windows so this will work nicely later when we blend this in we'll have a nice view out this window there's a lake out there some water unfortunately there's an ugly telephone pole but what are you going to do so now we have our window pole shot and we'll be ready now to go into editing and let's blend all these together alright guys so now that we're done shooting i've imported the images into lightroom so let's take a look at how we edit these together alright guys so you see here we have our shots that we took on site and first here we have our ambient shot now you can see this is our half power flash shot which we're not going to use because we did a stronger shot at half point seven as you see here it's a little bright brighter and we have knocked out a little more of the ambient light as opposed to this shot so i'm just going to go ahead and delete this half power flash shot because we're not going to need it we're going to use the stronger flash shot and when you're on site definitely don't be afraid to take multiple images it is sort of a trial on error process the flambian most likely you're going to have to play around with your settings your flash power to get it right so most likely you're going to be taking multiple images and finding out which is the right way to go and here we have our other flash shot of the overhang area here that we did this is our window view with no flash and finally our overexposed window shot all right so we're going to be sending these images over to photoshop but before we do that i just want to go through and make some quick adjustments like exposure adjustments and this little handy tool and when you're in library mode it's kind of nice for this i'm just going to bump the exposure up with this ambient shot because i think it's a little too dim you don't want a nice bright shot for the ambient even that may be more flash shots i'm going to bring exposure up on these just a tad too there we go [Music] all right that's probably good these are fine we don't need to mess with these again that's something i do normally just i go through and make sure that my exposures are kind of where i want them before i start working with them in photoshop so now that we have that squared away i'm going to select all these layers our photos and i'm going to go right click or control click and i'm going to go to edit in open as layers in photoshop all right so as you can see now our photos have populated into photoshop as layers and before i do anything here the first thing i'm going to do is select all these layers and i'm going to go to edit auto align layers and just hit auto the reason we do this is because while shooting we're touching the flash trigger on the camera we may have jiggled it and slightly misaligned our camera so we just want to make sure that all these images line up perfectly when we go to blend them all right so now that our images are aligned the first thing i want to do is composite these two flash images that we have into one image so i'm just going to select the top layer here i'm going to add a layer mask i'm going to make sure that i black selected and my brush tool b and then i'm going to go to i want a soft brush and my harness 25 is good flow percent is good really low flow and i'm just gonna make my brush look pretty big here and i'm just gonna paint in some of this flash image that's underneath by by having the layer mask selected and painting black on it the underneath layer will show through so so i just want to get some of this flash in here take my brush size down and uh i know really on the ceiling here just don't want to paint up here because we don't want to bleed over onto that so [Music] all right so overall that's good that's a good blend of the two flash images and i'm just going to now select two of them i'm gonna hit command e just to merge them together or just merging my layer down into the other so now we have one flash image here so i'm just gonna go now to our top layer here our ambient layer i'm gonna go to the blend mode luminosity that's just going to give us an initial blend and sort of even out our white balance and things like that so now we're ready to blend our ambient layer with our flash layer so what i'm going to do next is i want to come down here to layer mask again this time though i'm going to hit option click or alt click on it which will give us a black layer mask and hide it so again we want to make sure we have our brush tool selected b and again soft brush with a flow of five percent we want to make sure we have white selected since we're painting on a black layer mask so we're going to do now is just start painting in some of the ambient so this is all flash that we're seeing here and in flashy areas like over here we just want to start painting in ambient and just giving this a more natural look to it and with some of the ambient onto the couch here wherever you see wherever you see it looking real flashy you want to try to blend that in with some natural light this is more or less trial and error just going around you know if you go too far just switch black to white and paint some of it back in but just kind of just kind of finding that balance between a natural look and the flash and just blending these two together and you can come over here and kind of show and hide the layer and see kind of where you're at you can see how we're working in that ambient light here and how it's giving it a much more natural feel so we're looking pretty good here we've got some shadow from the flash here try to do that a little bit [Music] i'm pretty much liking how this looks here and i think we're good so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to merge our ambient our flash layer together so now we have one layer here next let's deal with our windows so we have our just ambient no flash view through the windows and we have this just in case we needed to repair any sort of imperfections here let's see like you can see some glare down here from the flash so from the chair and stuff and we can use this layer to repair that but for now we're just going to keep that layer down there for now and now what we're going to do with this is we're going to go up to blend mode and we're going to go to darken mode which will eliminate the overexposed areas and only use the darker areas like the view through the window so again what we want to do here is go down to layer mask add layer mask and i'm going to option click on it again to get a black layer mask and i'm going to take my white brush we can bring our flow up even to like 100 and you can just paint right over this that's the beauty of this and you'll see right out our windows that's the beauty of dark mode it's the quickest way to mask in a window it's pretty incredible so you see that just brought our window view right in so beautiful now if we wanted to deal with this sort of reflection here uh from the flesh shot this is what you would use this layer for and again same thing just add a layer mask hide make sure you have white selected you can just paint over some of this you know this isn't in darken mode so you're going to affect the edges here that's the only thing you have to be careful of so i just want to use a small brush getting it in here and you can just clean this up a little bit [Music] so as you can see we got rid of this claire here now and you know it's not that bad or hideous you probably didn't even have to do that necessarily but i just wanted to show you what why i take this layer and what it's for it's a repair layer to fix any glares or imperfections and you know it's a good idea to take one without a flash just for that reason so now that we have our windows view situated i'm going to just select all these layers and merge them down so we have some color issues here that i would like to take care of like on the wall here and how i'm going to do that i'm just going to command j and duplicate this layer i'm going to go to image hue and saturation i'm just going to desaturate this layer quite a bit i'm only concerned i'm looking at the whites here i just want to you know whiten up my whites i'm going to bring out the lightness here maybe a little bit i want to look gray so and i'm going to go with that for now i might even do a curves layer some image adjustment curves it's going to make a point in the middle here and i'm just going to pump up the mids a little bit just to make our whites look white and we hit okay again i'm going to alt click option click on the layer add layer mask and i'm going to hide that and all i would do here is i'm just going to take my polygonal lasso tool and i'm just going to go around first i'm just going to go around the ceiling here [Music] and i'm going to go to select we're going to modify feather i'm just gonna feather this by a pixel make sure your white is your background color and i'm just gonna hit command x and as you see now we have a nice white ceiling up here now the only thing is these oars let's take take a look at that real quick i'm just going to take my brush and with black selected i'll bring my my flow at 100 is fine and i'm going to bring my brush size up here and i'm just going to paint this back in a little bit so now we just have to take care of this area so again i'm going to zoom in here i'm just going to get my i'm going to hit l for my lasso tool again [Music] and again with our layer mask selected make sure white is our background color command x and i'm just gonna get that so now our wall is now all nice and white as well and again we have this sign here i just want to take care of this b i'm gonna hit my brush tool b make sure you're black and the same thing as before you can just come in here paint some of this back in [Music] all right so there we have it now we have a nice white clean looking wall and ceiling i'm just going to merge these two together now you know what here too i want to get rid of this uh stupid little curtain rod intruding into our photo it's definitely not adding anything so let's get rid of that all alright so there we go now that's looking good i just want to now save this image and we're going to take it over into back into lightroom and do some finishing touches okay so here's our image now that popped back over into lightroom so i'm going to develop module here you know just going to make some global tweaks to this a little exposure a little bit of shadow erase the shadows just maybe a tad give us some clarity so you know this isn't much as you can see it's just punching it up a little bit go to upright just to make sure all my verticals are straight and everything hit auto just straighten everything out got rid of our fringe from before when we aligned our layers that's what that was from it's from auto align meaning layers in photoshop i'm just gonna go to sharpening and i usually go 100 on my sharpening finally i'm just going to export this out and we'll take a look at the final image [Music] alright guys so i really hope this video gives you a good understanding of how to shoot and edit real estate images using the flambean method obviously the aim of this video is just to outline the basic process and i'll be getting into the more detailed tutorials on this process in future videos so definitely look out for that as well also if you're interested in any of the gear i recommended in this video as i mentioned there'll be links to it down in the description below thanks so much for watching this video i really hope you found it helpful if you did please hit the like button and subscribe if you haven't done so already as it really helps this channel grow if you're interested in supporting the channel in other ways and getting some cool perks please check out the link down in the description thank you so much for your support and i'll see you again on the next one [Music] you

Channel: Inside Real Estate Photography

Views: 57,172

Keywords: real estate photography, real estate photography tutorials, real estate photography tips, real estate photography for beginners, inside real estate photography, real estate video, real estate video tips, real estate videography, real estate video production, real estate video tutorials, flambient, HDR real estate photography, real estate photography gear, real estate photography camera, real estate photography lens, flambient real estate photography, flambient photography

Id: 8YMD0JyV3bg

Length: 27min 29sec (1649 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020