Table of Contents
- What Is HDR Photography?
- When Is HDR Photography Your Go-To Method?
- Situations When HDR Is Not the Optimal Choice
- How to Create HDR Photos
- What Is HDR Photo Editing?
- How to Easily Edit HDR Real Estate Photos
- Save Time With PhotoUp’s HDR Photo Editing Service
Do you want to learn how to easily edit HDR real estate photos?
Recent studies show that property listings featuring high dynamic range (HDR) photos sell 50% faster and increase online views by 118%. HDR editing enhances the visual appeal of a property through richness and depth, providing potential buyers with a clearer picture of a home’s features.
This guide is tailored for photographers seeking to sharpen their HDR photo editing skills and understand how to transform RAW images into stunning photos that showcase the true potential of any property.
Let’s get started by explaining HDR photography and how to create HDR real estate photos.
What Is HDR Photography?
HDR stands for high dynamic range — the exposure ranges between the darkest and the lightest parts of an image.
In other words, HDR photography is a method of capturing and editing photos to ensure that the entire dynamic range of a scene is retained.
This technique creates an image with luminosity and contrast that more accurately represents what the human eye can perceive.
Typically, when shooting HDR, the photographer takes at least three different exposures of the same image:
- The first one is a mid-range exposure shot
- The second image exposure is set to draw out the highlights
- And the third image seeks to capture shadows and depth
By combining photos of the same scene taken at different exposures, from underexposed to overexposed, a photographer can create an HDR image that displays the details in both the shadows and highlights.
When Is HDR Photography Your Go-To Method?
HDR photography is particularly effective in real estate photography, where details both inside and outside of a property are important.
It can be used to capture interiors that contain a wide range of light values, such as a room with windows streaming in daylight, ensuring that both the room’s interior and the view outside are properly exposed and detailed.
Overall, HDR works best on images where there is no movement; for example the exterior of a building, or a room with shades of light and dark.
Situations When HDR Is Not the Optimal Choice
Additionally, it’s critical to recognize instances where HDR photography isn’t necessary. Take a low-contrast room or scene, for instance. In such conditions, HDR techniques are surplus to requirements.
How can you tell the contrast? Look at the histogram — narrow range levels indicate low contrast.
Employing HDR in low-contrast images tends to produce overly saturated colors and a noticeably lackluster finish to the photographs.
Therefore, HDR is less than ideal for scenarios including:
- Shots taken during the delicate light of sunrise or sunset
- Imagery that aims to create striking silhouettes
- Attempts to mend an image or eliminate unwelcome shadows
- Photos capturing the spontaneity of people or animals’ movements
HDR comes into its own when you’re faced with a scene where the natural contrast stretches beyond what your camera can capture on its own.
How to Create HDR Photos
Creating HDR photos begins with capturing a series of bracketed shots. This is what you need to do:
- Set your camera to take multiple shots with different exposures. The number of shots and their exposure differences vary (e.g., -2, 0, +2), depending on the dynamic range of the scene
- Use a tripod to keep the frame stable between shots
- Consider using a remote shutter release or the camera’s self-timer to minimize any movement during capture
- Remember to shoot in RAW format to take full advantage of editing possibilities and image quality
The last step is to process the multiple exposures using HDR photo editing software to merge them into a single, balanced image, which we’ll take a closer look at below.
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What Is HDR Photo Editing?
HDR photo editing is the post-processing of an HDR image to improve its overall quality, enhance details, and bring out the full range of colors.
This involves software editing programs like Adobe Lightroom, which offer a host of tools specifically designed to work with high dynamic range images.
Benefits of HDR Photo Editing
The benefits of HDR photo editing for real estate photography are numerous:
- It captures the depth and texture of architectural details
- Balancing shadows and highlights creates images with a wide tonal range, providing a more ‘real’ impression of a space
- It can transform a property’s exterior or interior scenes to their best light condition, even on an overcast day
- Enhances the richness of the color palette, giving the viewer a more immersive experience
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at how to easily edit HDR photos in Lightroom for real estate photography.
How to Easily Edit HDR Real Estate Photos in Lightroom
To get started learning how to edit HDR real estate photos, you can either watch the video tutorial or continue reading the text below:
Import and Infuse Photos
Step 1. To get started, Import your photos into Lightroom. Then, Sort your Photos by File Name to keep the photos in order during the HDR process.
Step 2. To produce an HDR photo, we need to infuse them. So, Select your images, right-click, and select Stacking and Group into Stack. Or you can select them all and Auto Stack by Capture Time, and Lightroom will automatically stack them.
Step 3. For the infuse process, you can also infuse multiple stacks of photos. Just select them all, and then go to File >> Plug-in Extras, and then click on Blend exposures using LR/Enfuse. This will open a dialog box.
Step 4. In the Auto Align tab, you need to make sure the option Automatically align images before blending them is checked so that Lightroom will automatically align the photos before blending them.
Step 5. Since we stack our photos, in the Output tab, the Batch Mode should be checked. Next, in Output files (on the same tab), you need to also check the Create blended images in the same folder as the images in the stack option.
Saving Your Infused Files
Step 6. To save the infused files in the same folder as the original (still on the same tab under after blending), check the Reimport image into Lightroom option so the infused product will automatically appear in Lightroom after reviews.
Besides that, you have the option to Stack with originals. Stacking with originals will automatically group with the images you’ve stacked beforehand. It’ll be the first image on the stack.
On the other hand, if you opt not to stack with originals, the infused image will appear beside the stacked images. Either way is fine.
Step 7. Next, click Infuse Images. The progress can be viewed in the upper left corner of the screen. However, since we infused multiple stacks of photos, this will take time.
Step 8. When the infuse is done and you don’t see the infused photos, go to the Library and select the Folder, where you put the images. This will sort of refresh the folder.
If you are still confused, the infused image will always be a tiff file. When the infuse is done you can now start editing the photos with basic editing.
And that’s it!
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Save Time With PhotoUp’s HDR Photo Editing Service
While the manual editing process described above offers a high level of control, it also requires significant time.
For real estate photographers looking to scale their business without compromising image quality, PhotoUp’s HDR editing service provides a professional solution.
By outsourcing your HDR editing, you can save time and focus on what you do best—capturing properties in their best light.
Boasting over a decade-spanning saga of expertise in real estate and architectural photography, PhotoUp’s international ensemble of seasoned HDR photo editors sets the gold standard in the realm.
The suite of specialist HDR photo editing solutions offered at PhotoUp includes:
- Harmonizing varied exposure levels
- Remedying intense shadows, inadequate lighting, and ensuring equilibrium
- Refining fuzzy photographs to achieve sharp, well-defined intricacies
As witnessed in our past work, the HDR photographs refined by PhotoUp are nothing short of remarkable.
Best of all, our real estate photo editing service is affordable, starting at the low cost of $1.10 per image depending on your subscription. Plus, our turnaround time is 24 hours or less.
A Complete Real Estate Marketing Partner
On top of that, PhotoUp is a complete real estate marketing partner and also offers additional services such as:
- Virtual staging
- Virtual house tours
- Video editing
- Single property websites
- Custom websites
- Floor plans
- Property flyers
- House portraits
- Virtual Assistants
- And more.
We have everything you need to enhance and market real estate photography on one user-friendly platform.
How to Get Started
Getting started is super simple.
All you need to do is sign up for a free PhotoUp account, upload your images, provide us with instructions, choose export settings and turnaround time, and lastly, download your beautifully edited images!
PhotoUp Real Estate Photo Editing Uploader Demo
To see how easy it is to get started with PhotoUp, check out our real estate photo editing uploader demo:
It’s really that simple!
Sign up for a free PhotoUp account and take your HDR real estate photography to the next level. And as a bonus, you get 10 free edits when you sign up for an account.
We hope this blog post helped you learn how to edit HDR real estate photos in Lightroom. If you found this post valuable, you may also want to check out some related resources:
