I have recently discovered flambient lighting for my real estate shoots. Yes, I’m a bit late to the game, but I don’t like traditional real estate photography with a window. I started off shooting short-term rentals, and the style is natural light with a little flash for fill. I photographed for Plum Guide, and they were strictly natural light, which was a bit difficult, especially for a pitch dark bathroom shot.
This video is great if you want to learn a quick and easy way to blend flambient photos in Photoshop.
Flambient lighting looks great, and with this post-production technique, it's way easier in Photoshop compared to the way I was shooting real estate photos. The time spent in Photoshop is a fraction of what it was. The shooting time is a bit longer depending on how many photos you are taking. I usually take two with a possible window pull shot, so it’s really not that much longer.
I would recommend deleting all of the TIFF files that are created from Photoshop when saving back to Lightroom. I’m not used to using Photoshop for every photo I take, so I learned this once my new computer was out of disk space. I discovered all of the flambient TIFF files and deleted them to make room on my computer.
I have started using flambient style for all of my interior shoots, which may be overkill for the lease vacant apartments that I shoot, but for now, I will continue using this style and retouching technique for all of my shoots.
I feel like when you're getting started with RE, you eventually find your way to Nathan Cool or Rich Baum teaching flambient. It's a good way to get going and handles a lot of the challenging, poorly lit scenes.
My only issue is the window pull aspect. Most real estate work tends to have every view pulled beyond reality, and thus you end up getting views from bedrooms looking directly into adjacent buildings that aren't so flattering. I wish people would embrace the ambient layers a bit more with their edits, but then again most of the editing is done in Vietnam or India for ~$1 anyway.