Real Estate Flambient or HDR photography are the two most popular methods photographers use to shoot real estate photos. They are all include 3-5 brackets of images but the way we take it has some difference. Truth be told, these are all the most favorite services that we are providing for your listing. Some clients choose to present their homes with HDR brackets but others decide to take flambient shots. All of them can achieve good results with either technique but people often ask “which one is better”? Today, NiceColor is going to compare some of the advantages and disadvantages to each method. We hope that after that you can understand which one is better for you.
Do you know what is Auto Merged HDR?
Real estate HDR photography
The auto merge HDR is the common technique when it comes to merging brackets of photos together like Adobe Lightroom software. Once we take the HDR brackets with 3-5 exposures, it is quite easy to use Lightroom to get the final photo you want. This process is called Real Estate Basic editing. Many editing companies use this software’s function to reduce the post-processing time and then reduce the editing cost.
Some further tasks like window masking or color correction would be necessary to help your images look more realistic. But incase of comparison’s sake, it is only the level of basic editing.
Because we aim to make a compelling image so this basic editing is not able to help you bring out the highest or optimal visual quality. Compared with professional editing, you can see it over-processed, with lackluster contrast, texture-ironed, and not natural. It seems tobe still reflect a sense of an “HDR” look. As a result, exposure-merged HDR images are easy to get various color casts and inaccurate color rendering.
Mannually or Hand-blend Merger HDR
Because of all these auto-merged disadvantages, then Hand blending HDR images is released as a destiny to solve them all. As it named, editors have to spend more time to blends these brackets of images together with a manually blend tool.
As a result, even taking a longer processing time, it promises for much higher level of quality over the look of your final image. While putting in various of effort and time, you can optimize the blend in only 3 out of 5 brackets. By taking advantage of hand blending HDR tools, it result in a more natural, lessprocessed-looking final image with better color rendition. It is a great way that ultimately has a noticeably higher quality appearance.
Obviously, this hand-blending HDR technique is especially suitable for those who are able to spend more time and effort on them. WHile you put more work into it like window masking, color correction, etc, you can get more detailed requirements and higher quality expectation. So choosing a professional editing team with a set of actions and presets is the suitable solution to save more time and money.
Thanks to its exclusive unique shooting, many high-end properties choose this kind of photography to optimal creativity and artistic exploration. By adding a flash to your real estate photography, your images have many chances to present the most accurate color of the room. Moreover, including ambient light in the room with flash, it helps you to eliminate almost all color casts. It is the biggest advantage that flambient photography brings out to your images.
As its features, the more light is used, the more accurate image you got. Thanks to the ambient layer, like using hand-blended HDR, real estate Flambient editing allows better control over the final look. It brings out your images even more natural and realistic.
In Conclusion
When it comes to choosing if HDR photo or flambient is the best then it is depended. As a homeowners, they do not know much about their difference but well performance. If you are a photographer or agent, you can base on the property and the circumstance to decide which one is more suitable. As you can see, HDR Photography requires a camera and a photographer, while Flambient requires a laundry list of lighting and studio equipment. Even each method have their pros and cons, but for most residential homes, HDR does the trick. Last but not least, we generally recommend Flambient for luxury properties but it increases the duration of shoots significantly and takes a bit longer to edit.
