How To Use HDR for Stunning Architectural Photography in 2024 (Or Real Estate Photography)

I have shared a lot of ways on this channel where we can bring back our highlights in our Overexposed Architectural Interiors looking out of the windows one of my favorite ways to do that is with the lumenia panel in Photoshop but I know that a lot of you that follow me have access to luminar Neo I wanted to share with you guys how we can leverage one of the most powerful extensions inside of luminar Neo to benefit us for our architectural photography it's really going to speed up our workflow when we use it properly so let me show you how to do that with this example here so I took these images here for a kitchen designer and the four that we're going to work on were part of a bracketed set of five I don't know where the base exposure actually ended up going this was a shoot I did quite a long time ago but it doesn't matter we have everything we need if I open up our darkest exposure and we look at the tabletop here we can see that where the sunlight is hitting the table we've got all of the detail we need it's not perfect for outside up here but to be honest in this particular shot I don't need to have access to that data out there so I'm not going to worry about that but if I jump to my very brightest exposure here you can see that yeah it's completely Overexposed however we have some beautiful detail in the black chairs here also the black light fixture as well so between these four photos with the intermediate ones here as well we have access to all of the brightness information that we need that the camera has captured so how can we combine these using luminar Neo well first of all I'm going to show you how easy it is to do it but the wrong way to do it and then we'll correct ourselves and I'll show you the correct workflow to make sure that everything looks good when it comes back from Neo so with the first image in your series selected just hold shift and then select the final image and that's going to choose all of those photos for you then right click on a PC or option click on a Mac and then come to the option to export from there we can see that we have options for luminar AI luminar Neo nit collection all my favorite plugins but in this one we're going to go to HDR merge in luminar Neo and simply click that Lightroom is going to send a message to luminar Neo say hey please open up with those four photos and then we have the option just to merge those photos so you can see that we have an exposure value of -2 -1 we don't have a zero which would should be our base exposure A+ one and a plus two but as I said it doesn't actually matter I'm just going to hit merge and see what this does for us now before we look at the result I just need to clarify something the HDR that I'm talking about here is not that nasty HDR that you may be familiar with from years ago that you know is best left in the past really ugly kind of processing this is clean it's very useful and it's done with a completely different algorithm and you would have noticed the lack of input that us as users actually put in when we put those photos into luminar Neo that's a great thing because we're trusting the engine that is built on the Aurora engine that was very very successful for um Skyland back in the day they've stopped making Aurora now but they put that engine inside of luminar Neo and it's that beautiful processing engine that actually gives us these high quality results so the fact we're not having to mess around with sliders like micro contrast and all that stuff we used to do in HDR where there was the potential for really messing things up we're trusting in the engine and we're getting some great results as a result let's take a look so bearing in mind we've done nothing to this file this result already looks pretty good now this isn't the way that I would recommend doing it we can certainly improve this result but it just shows you that even when you don't set up the file properly and follow the correct procedure we can still get a good result so I'm going to click apply just so that we have access to that file so just as a quick comparison we've taken these four photographs and we've thrown them into luminar Neo and it spat this out for us which is combination of the best of all of these into this one file but we can do better so I'm going to just select the first and the last photo and I'm going to turn on auto syncing and that's going to mean that any adjustments I make to any of these photos it's going to be propagated through that whole series now I don't want to do too much all I'm going to do is make sure that we have the correct profile applied so I'm going to come to a camera matching profile and I'm just going to choose the flat profile that way we're just giving it a helping nudge towards expanding the dynamic range already so if you compare landscape it's very contrasty I go to flat and we see a lot more detail and for our purposes that is exactly what we want so I'll close that down we don't need to shift the exposure and try and second guess how this should be looking already because that's why we're using the HDR merge tool to save us some time but one thing we do want to do is make sure that the white balance is consistent through all of these you'll notice that I've got as shot as my option when I take these photos and that's going to mean that we may have slight variations which we do in the color balance see this temperature is 4,600 if I go to the next one 4,650 4,700 and then 4,700 so they're not all the same they're pretty close but they're not so I'm just going to choose a white balance that I think looks quite good so we'll go with 4,684 we'll give the tint a little movement as well again just making sure that's synchronized between all of these and you might think that you want to drop down the highlights or boost the Shadows again just to give it a helping hand in terms of bringing back all of those details you do not just leave those all alone also don't start introducing Clarity yet either we can do all of that afterwards when we start to work on the luminar Neo HDR version we get back I don't want to make any adjustments to the tone curve color mixer color grading all the details either but one thing I do want to focus on are the lens Corrections because currently we are working in the Raw State and so we can apply chromatic aberration removal we can apply enable profile Corrections and that is a great thing to do when you're working with architecture because you want to make sure that any Barrel Distortion or pin cushioning is removed from your lens and you can see down here in the file type it's nef so nickon electronic file format which is a raw file format but if I just quickly select that luminar Neo edit you can see that is a do Tiff so once something's a tiff you can no longer tap in to those chromatic aberration and enable profile Corrections because it's just not going to find that information to match your lens anymore so once we've stepped back out of luminar Neo and brought that Tiff into Lightroom we can no longer access this stuff so we want to make sure that we're doing that during this initial prepping stage the other thing that I would strongly recommend you do at this stage rather than afterwards is just come in select the guided transform tool and that way we can come in and just make sure that our verticals are true yes I know there is a tool to correct our verticals and automatic and full I just prefer the guided method I like to do everything manually and that way I know the geometry in my photos is absolutely spoton now last time we came to rightclick we went to export and in the luminar Neo section here we went to HDR merge in luminar Neo however that sends over our raw photo so if I go for that option all of those changes that we just made are going to be forgotten you watch this it's going to process the photos which the thumbnails indicated were corrected but when we actually zoom in you can see that we still have chromatic aberration and if I move this over to the edge of the screen you can see that it's definitely not vertical either so we've just sent all of that setup work down the drain so I'm going to cancel that I'm going to show you the right way to do this now so we right click we still come to export but this time come all the way to the top of that menu to export dot dot dot click on that and now from this export dialog box we want to come to the luminar Neo section you can choose that from export to and make sure luminar Neo is chosen but it should be over here in this panel here luminar Neo we're going to come to HDR merge in luminar Neo so far everything would give us the same result as what we had before however now we can come over and choose image format and rather than having original which is going to send those raws which is not going to take all of these adjustments with it this time we choose Tiff and that is going to hard bake those Corrections that we've already made into Lightroom into our file so I don't want to compress anything the color space srgb very small color space what I'd prefer to do is make sure it's editing with Adobe RGB make sure that my bit depth is not on eight make sure it's on 16 we want to be sending a nice rich data file over to luminar Neo send export and now you can see we've got a full dynamic range got all the detail in the table and our verticals as you can see on this far left hand side is nice and true the same over here on the right hand side as well if I move that to the edge of the frame here that is nice and true now of course we could carry on processing this inside of luminar Neo but seeing as I'm in a Lightroom workflow at the moment I just want to use the HDR merge tool to be honest so I'm going to click apply now if we compare the new one on the left to the original on the right you'll see a couple of subtle differences on the right we do have more of a color shift and that would be due to the fact that we had a differing white balance going on between the different photos that is corrected we still have color issues that we need to deal to however it's much more consistent through the whole photo also the verticals are corrected as well whereas we have a bit of a lean going on on the original and also the lens correction has not been applied so there is just a little bit of bowing that is evident at the outside of the frame so now we have this lovely Tiff to work with this is where we can come in and actually start to make some adjustments here we could bring the exposure up slightly bring up the contrast usually on Raw photos I'm bringing the highlights down but in this case because we've already had all the highlights taken care of the nice thing is we can actually push that up and just brighten up the White Walls there so that's quite nice and usually I'm also bright in up the Shadows on raw files however we've had those taken care of as well so I don't think they even need to move to be honest we can have a little play with Clarity pop in a little bit more detail in there maybe even the texture as well and a little bonus tip to take care of the White Walls what I'd like to do is come into the masking section here and we can actually select a color range now you might think a Luminosity range be the way to go what I like to do is just pick a color range that's a good representation for most of the walls we can then come in and refine that if we feel that's just a little bit too broad and there's several ways we could improve this mask but I'm going to go for a down and dirty method very shortly so we want to jump into the color section here and grab saturation and if I actually push it up for now you can actually see more evidently that color cast that's going on so normally when you've got Timber or any kind of colored carpet in this case the timber tiles that's just going to reflect the color that they are up onto the ceiling we got blue discoloration there on the walls as well but for now let's take care of that yellow cast so I'm just going to bring that down into the negative territory and currently you can see that mask is also affecting the cabinet tree as well a little bit of the table that's not what we want so I'm just going to come to the three dots there on the mask and that's going to allow me to choose intersect mask with and in this case I'm going to choose a brush with a nice high flow nice and large and then I can just click and start painting and anywhere that I paint now that is just going to neutralize that area in conjunction with the mask that we set up previously so that means I can leave the timber Cabinetry alone the table alone and just clean up the ceiling the blue color cast on the left where we've got daylight coming in through the windows it's not really bothering me to be honest but I know that some people are really anti any color cast whatsoever so we'll just jump into the color mixer make sure we're on blue and we can just drop that down if you drop it down completely so now we have absolute gray no color value whatsoever I think things start to look a little bit sterile a little bit unnatural to be honest and so while you might not want such an intense blue cast by removing it completely I think it just looks really fake so for my personal preference with Aesthetics I like to just reduce it but not get rid of it completely so if I hold the backlash key on the keyboard we can see the original Tiff file that came back from luminar Neo and then release we can see our edited version before and after and now I'm doing that I do notice that I'm losing some of that lovely detail we brought back in the table so it might be a case of just creating another mask maybe this time I'll come in with luminance range and just select over the table here and make sure that I just reduce that exposure so that we still see some of that detail and yes you can see that we're affecting other areas so again what I'm going to do is intersect that mask probably the easiest way to do it is with a brush you can use other tools to intersect it with but a brush is going going to give you just that little bit more control so we can paint back in just that little bit of detail there and then as a final step I'd just like to crop my photo down I never intended to have that much ceiling but I prefer to leave my photo uncropped while I'm doing all of that work so that I have the option to come back in and add things in if I want I'm a doofus I realize as I'm working on that final crop I've actually been working on the wrong file the one that we hadn't corrected but that still looked pretty good right so let me just SN over those adjustments and we'll work on the correct file so I'm going to check all to synchronize every setting I'm going to replace any masks that were there before hit enter and now this is the correct photo that I wanted to work on maybe give just a little bit more breathing space on this right hand side and there we go here's our before here's our after before and after and I'd also like to just bring your attention to the original raw files as well so this file is probably as close to the edited file as we could work with so just for example sake if I wanted to try and bring back that detail on the table and I dro the highlights all the way down it's not doing a great job there at all the same outside here as well we can start to drop the exposure down to try to bring those details back but you can see it just doesn't hold the pixel information of our newly generated HDR image like look at all of that lovely Rich detail on the table if you like the look of what the HDR merge extend ition in Lumar Neo can do and you don't have Neo yet I do have a discount Link in the description that you can check out however there are a couple of things that you need to understand about luminar Neo before you say yep that's the tool for me some of you might be thinking why don't I just edit all of my architecture inside of luminar Neo and I got to be straight up while I do love it as an editor it is lacking in certain features that Lightroom has so for example the guided tool for me to correct the verticals that's something that's really important to my work flow also the XMP data and database management that Lightroom has that allows me to manage a lot more photos and cataloges than I can do inside luminar Neo so I try and take the best of both applications I still use Lightroom I still use Photoshop but I borrow the things that Neo can do better and I use that in conjunction with those tools now I know somebody out there is thinking this right now why don't you use h HDR merge in Lightroom why using Neo in the first place why bother well it's actually really simple Lightroom HDR merge creates a 32bit file that consolidates all of that data into one file however the work isn't done at that point you still need to go in and start moving sliders around and so you're trying to manipulate that file with Lightroom highlight Shadows whites black sliders all of that stuff it doesn't actually do tone mapping for you and that is what the engine in luminar Neo is doing it's tone mapping that data file so it's doing what Lightroom does which is combining those photos into a 32bit file to work with it's then doing post- production on it doing the tone mapping part which Lightroom doesn't do that's why we get a really nice usable image at the end of that process I hope that makes sense so I've already gone on the record and said luminar Neo is not the tool that I use predominant for my architectural editing I'm utilizing it for a couple of specific reasons this is one of them and I love it for this but there is a second utility that is amazing and if you're an architectural or real estate photographer you are going to love it so if you would like to learn that technique just write what else in the comments below and if enough of you ask I'm going to put a video together with that technique as well cuz honestly it's a game Cher in terms of speed efficiency all that good stuff and I'd love to just hear your thoughts and comments on this video if it's been helpful to you do me a favor and leave me a thumbs up if you think it would be helpful to anybody else please feel free to share it with them sharing is caring thank you very much for watching I'll see you in the next video bye-bye for now

Channel: AT Architectural Photography

Views: 20,925

Keywords: Architectural photography, architecture photography, photographing homes, photography education, interior photography, professional photography, lightroom, edit architecture in lightroom, lightroom classic, edit architecture with HDR, Luminosity masking, Luminosity masking for architecture photography, luminosity masking for real estate photography, edit architecture with photoshop, lumenzia, lumenzia real estate, lumenzia tutorials

Id: TWsQqgCDbrY

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2024