A better HDR solution

[Peeb]

Your looks much better than my first effort. I used photoshop photomerge and the result is the traditional "overcooked HDR" look that pretty much telegraphs what you are doing. Yours, OP, was much more subtle, which is better.

 

[Alexr25]

I'm not a great fan of HDR so my comments could be somewhat biased but the problem with your images is that they all to a greater or lesser degree lack contrast. In the case of the image of the kitchen there is not enough tonal range in the scene to warrant using HDR and all it does is compress the tonal range of the image and gives a flat, false looking result.
Using just one photo (1AM_5355.jpg) from your example and processing it in lightroom gives a better image than the various HDR versions.

 

[Braineack]

I'm not a great fan of HDR so my comments could be somewhat biased but the problem with your images is that they all to a greater or lesser degree lack contrast. In the case of the image of the kitchen there is not enough tonal range in the scene to warrant using HDR and all it does is compress the tonal range of the image and gives a flat, false looking result.
Using just one photo (1AM_5355.jpg) from your example and processing it in lightroom gives a better image than the various HDR versions.

awful. you have blown-out sky in the windows and rays of bright light streaming into a brightened kitchen. You wouldn't want to give potential buyers the impression that the kitchen gets good natural light and is not otherwise a dungeon.

 

[Braineack]

I saw a really cool video on HDR a while back on YT. I wish I could find it again.

Instead of the mindset "I need to take 3 images" he basically took how little or many exposures it took, at equal stop-incriments in order to capture full DR -- then he would combine those.

Basically his shortest exposure was just clipping the blacks, then increase the shutter speed until he was just clipping the whites. In some cases it might just need one exposure, and others maybe 5-6. But he said the key was shooting narrower stops between shots.

So if say you needed 2-stops of light starting at 1/125sec, he might shoot: 1/125, 1/160, 1/200, 1/250, 1/320, 1/400, and 1/500.

something like that at least, it's been a while.

His results were pretty fantastics, and the idea of only taking what you need makes plenty of sense to me.

I'll see if I can dig it up.

 

[407370]

I had a closer look at the kitchen pics.
The blown out windows are a problem with how the pic was taken and not the processing. Think of tone mapping as enhancing everything that is in the pic including blown highlights. If realism is the goal then I would take more pics later in the day.

As a matter of interest, how are these pics to be used?

• Do they get uploaded full size for potential buyers to download?
• are they printed and if so at what size?

 

[bulldurham]

If you wonder where Jimmy McIntyre got his "actions" from, you might want to go to the original source, Tony Kuyper Photography—Getting the Actions if you look at some of his screen shots you will see a layer line that reads TK actions which is Tony Kuyper. If you really want to learn how to do Luminoisty/Channel work, this is the source I recommend to everyone.