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Real Estate Photography

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2.77 - "Solid" 
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3 Comments

I like the attention to detail pain in positioning things. I gave this a 3 because it seems like there are some white balance issues going on . Was this an HDR photo?

Hey Michael, thanks for the comments. It is not an HDR photo. I believe this is flashed at a lower shutter speed (1/40th at 320 ISO) then tweaked in LR. There was also a window pull as well. As for the WB it could have a slight red tint from the cabinets. What would you do to correct this without changing feel to be too green or appearing too cold?

I'd say the biggest place where you notice it is the ceiling so one way to deal with this would be to create a mask and just desaturate the ceiling a bit.

A couple of things about using a flash is remember that you're dealing with two separate exposures. You flash doesn't care about your shutter speed (unless you go higher than the sync speed) so using a slow shutter speed is just allowing more ambient light into the image which is probably why it looked like an HDR shot to me (different color temps are one of the main issues of HDR). Also, you always have to be careful about strong colors either in furniture or in the floor creating color casts so you have to account for that when setting your flash power and determining how you're going to bounce.

One way to avoid temperature conflicts is to just take your shot at 1/200 of a second and use only your flash to light the room, allowing very little ambient light to play a role. That way your white balance will be even. You can take multiple shots like this and blend them together to even out the exposure across the frame. Then take a separate ambient-only shot and layer it on top in Luminosity mode so that it throws out the color information. This usually gets rid of conflicting white balances.

If you're dealing with the potential for strong color casts, try bouncing your flash off a white reflector or foam board to diffuse it and reduce the strength of any color casts. If you get them anyway, you can always mask and desaturate a bit as needed.