SOLVED! Perfect Exposure Blending for Architecture Photography
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 มิ.ย. 2023
- If you're struggling to combine the highlights of the exterior with darker interior in your architectural photography this tutorial is for you. I use this panel (bit.ly/3dpGeub) for accurate masks and seamless blending. We're going to create fantastic results without any need for additional lights.
Some people complain they end up with flat images that have lost their contrast after they do the exposure blend. Let's solve the most common issues in this video.
I'll show you:
1) how to set up your masks the right way. and...
2) how to prepare the layers properly so the blend is seamless
All you need is Photoshop (bit.ly/CC-adobe) and this panel to create the masks (bit.ly/3dpGeub). As mentioned in the video, I would STRONGLY recommend the Exposure Blending Mastery Course that you can get as a bundle along with the panel. It will vastly improve your success with this method and many other techniques too.
𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲
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Anthony - you are just SO GOOD at explaining and demonstrating all your editing videos, you are one of the clearest. Thank you for this demonstration, it just continues to fill in the gaps for common knowledge for all.
It's absolutely crazy the AMOUNT of knowledge we can get in your videos Anthony, I've been following you for a few days, and I already feel like pro ! (I'm definitely not) all your content is like a perfect course, no gate keeping, pure help ! I love it, keep going Anthony !
i re-edited my shots 3 years ago with this method and holy. the difference is big. thanks bro
Great to hear!
I'm new to the discipline of Real Estate/Architectural Photography and your tutorials are helping me to better understand the proper approach! Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and massive skills so generously. With love from Atlanta.
You are producing the best videos on TH-cam for this kind of work.
Always up to our expectations. Thanks Anthony.
Great tutorials, very helpful, but do you have one explaining how to do it without all the extra plug ins and tools? I get that it saves time, and i might invest in the future, but right now i would love to just be able to do it myself in photoshop. Thank you🥰
Bloody brilliant mate! Cheers!
Such a helpful video, and super easy to follow - thank you!
Thanks Anthony. I got same problem all the time but now I understand more about it.
genius. matching the mid-tones... i had no idea. this will remove a lot of frustrations in the future. 👍👍!
Thanks, this is exactly the issues I have been having ; ). I appreciate the excellent videos .
Thank you! Great video!
Thanks a ton. Really good easy to understand explanation. Thanks again.
I just finished a project where I struggled with this exact problem. Going back now and looking at my images to apply these techniques.
Wow! Mind blowing! I really needed this tutorial. Thanks! It's been a while since I've been trying to get better images, this is the solution! Thanks!
Glad it helped!
I just tried it... and IT WORKS! :). Thanks!
Aaamazing. Thanks for the eye-opening tutorials. The way you take your time to explain every bit of the process deserves a beautiful praise. Thanks AT. You are the best. It would be nice to introduce some of your raw pictures (definitely not your client's work. Lol!) for us to work with and send back to you for assessment.
i love your videos. Thanks for the information and the effort you're putting in to help others. Are you able to do a video on how to set up Lightroom Classic pre-sets? i'd love to see that and set something similar up for myself as a beginner.
Another great video. Thank you Anthony. 😎🤙
Glad you enjoyed it
GREAT explanation! I’ve been struggling with the muddying for years. Thanks Anthony! (About that pre-processing preset however 🧐)
this is amazing thank you
Excellent video, thank you
Great tutorial, very deep and clear, interesting.
Many thanks!
Wow! I've struggled with fine-tuning Lumenzia, so this was an "AH-HA" video for me! Thanks for the great information. Subscribed and will share with others. Love your channel. 😍
Awesome! Thank you!
Excellent video and I do appreciate your educational approach. I'm an equal opportunity student and shoot both flambient and lumenzia blended exposures depending on the shoot. The key point you make about ensuring midtone alignment between exposure layers is important and you've made it in a few of your videos. Any further tips for doing this, perhaps in Lightroom prior to exporting as smart object to Photoshop? Said differently, should I be able to look at mid-tone areas in the component exposures and identify "oh, that's likely to be muddy once I blend"? In the ACR edits in this video you weren't really comparing it to the base layer you were just brightening it up. At 18:52 you say "midtones match or are slightly brighter than the base layer". Is a proactive midtones boost a good idea or not necessarily? Thanks in advance for any guidance.
Good points Jeffery. Tbh I can do it by eye now so for me it makes no odds doing it in ACR or lightroom. But that's not very helpful from an instructional sense, I'll have a think if there's a better way to show the mid-tone matching approach.
So with regards to your own work, and being an equal-opportunities shooter, what determined the direction you take for your images, flamient vs exposure blending. Thanks 🙂
Thanks for great explanation of the process and sharing it with us, it could be super helpful!
Also You tell at the end of video that you use an action/preset to speed up the process.
Just for the sake of the video and explanation the process it was longer.
Did you make a video about this preset/action? Or maybe thinking about it to make it in the future?
I'm wondering same
Thank you so much for these great tutorial , really help and learn allot from it , the way you explain amazing my friend :D thank you ,
Glad it was helpful!
I tried shooting brackets but always find exposing for the windows and lighting the room works best? I would love to learn more about hdr and shooting brackets
Finally i can use Lumenzia . Many thanks 🙏🏻
Anthony, this is a master piece of luminosity masking techniques tutorial. Thank you for sharing. Question: some people strongly feather the mask, e.g. 100, Is it needed in this double masking method?
Thanks
Hello can you do lumenzia with flambient? Using flash window pull ?
Anthony thank you very much for your content! I switched from HDR to manually blending exposures and now I'm learning how to make luminosity masks. Sometimes I've got that muddiness and sometimes feathering mask helps. What do you think about it?
I'm not big on the idea of feathering the mask. The masks Lumenzia (bit.ly/3dpGeub ) creates are do precise that I feel If you've followed these steps there's no need to fudge the mask and reduce it's fidelity with feathering. How much are you using for the feather amount?
@@archiphoto I think about 35 pixels😅I know that's wrong🙄I will learn your way of blending exposures😌
Have you thought of doing a video about using Lumenzia for correcting white balance. Often I will have blue furniture and pillows in an interior and just pulling back the blues will ruin those colors. But I want the blue off the whites. Have you ever used Lumenzia for that or do you have another method. Same thing for the yellows, magentas, cyans, etc. Thanks.
Thank you for the insights! It sounds clear in the video, but working on my own pictures, it's quite hard to get a great end product...
Feel free to send some raw files to me to take a look at. anthonyeditsyourphotos@gmail.com
Hi Anthony, I usually shoot 3 images 2 stops apart, and the darkest image is get for the highlights is usually way too dark to match the middle expose... is there anything I am doing wrong?? thanks a lot!
Hi Anthony .. I’ve learned so much from your videos .. thank you! Question .. your images in Lightroom, right from the start, look so much better than mine .. no matter what I do there is always some unwanted warmth in my raw photos. Do you apply a preset on import to remove any warmth? Especially if the room is poorly lit( which is not the case in this tutorial and you have tons Id natural cool light) how to fix the warmth in the raw brackets before blending?
Hi Lisa, Hmmm warmth in the raw photos. No it's not really something I experience. I do kick things off with an initial preset ad then may tweak white balance from there if necessary. Sometimes I drop the yellow / orange saturation in HSL if there's a cast. If it's really evident though I'll use photoshop to take care of it. The video on setting up my preset is here: th-cam.com/video/l6_NqXTsjD0/w-d-xo.html
Thank you very much, but if we open files as smart objects, how do we align the layers?
Is there a repeatable way to get the exposure of the highlight or shadow layers to match the base layer (like when you are adjusting things around 17:00? I have trouble knowing if I've matched the midtone exposure properly just eyeballing it or trying to remember what the base layer looks like. Do I need to just pick a couple points and look at the values in the histogram between the base layer and the one that I'm adjusting to try to get those midtones matching?
Thanks Anthony for the great video. You explain it so well and this is exactly the problem I am having. Would you be able to share the raw files and final edit for us to practice on the same picture to help learn? Seriously think you should make a small easy Real Estate / Architectural editing training course with particular focus on lumenzia. Thanks so much :)
I'd love to be able to share these images for practice / learning but most of what I demo is all captured on professional gigs so I'm not able to share the photos. I'm in the process of teeing up a fake shoot so that I have more flexibility with the files. Watch this space....
merci énormément 🙏
De rien mon ami!
Hey buddy! Fantastic video once again. Was waiting for your latest architecture entry!
Great tutorial. I noticed that today you used a neutral picture profile to prep your bracket whereas I usually know you to use your camera flat profile. Was there a reason for this change today?
Haha! Good spotting! Yes the reason is... my flat profile has mysteriously disappeared. I need to reinstall it. Yes, the flatter the better for a starting point.
@@archiphoto Haha that's unusual! Annoyingly Canon does not have a native flat profile but it was relatively easy to make my own! Just popped into ACR with camera neutral, bump down the contrast a bit more and a little bit of desaturation and voila, new profile.
Thanks for sharing this Anthony! Great tutorial as usual! Is there a chance to get access to your LR base presets?
I was gonna ask the same😅
Hi mate. I may cover it in another video (I did do one a while back) but I put it out there for a vote in the comments and while I did get a few requests, it was only a handful. These vids actually take quite a while to put together so if I only get several people request something it's hard to justify the time to create it. Hope that makes sense 😀
@@archiphoto Presets please!! 😃
I recently purchased Luminar Neo through your 30% discount code, awesome first year price, thank you!
How does this compare to processing the same photo in Luminar Neo only? Haven’t had any success finding similar lumenzia features in Neo, any workaround suggestions? Maybe have both lumenzia and Neo?
Hi Bob. Yeah, Lumenzia is unique in what it allows us to do. The key is luminosity masking which currently bit.ly/Luminar-NEO doesn't support. However it does have the exceptional HDR merge extension (exceptional from a results point of view rather than customisation). Both methods can get you to the end result but for sheer control and flexibility doing it this way is my preference. I do still use NEO as an automated finishing step to give the image a bit more life though.
hi would a 14mm focal length be suitable for architecture photography or should i go with a 16-35 like everyone on youtube says? i ask because i already have a 24-70 art lens so im thinking the 16-35 wouldnt make sense idk. thanks
Hi mate. 14 is pretty wide. And there's a lot of potential between the 16-23mmm you'd be missing out on with a 14mm. I'd go 16-35mm tbh
Anthony, new update allows you to open smart objects as layers now
True. Thanks Tristan!
I enjoy your videos. Do you have presets that you use to prepare the files pre blending?
I do! I mentioned it in my recording but then cut that bit out as I felt I was getting too into the weeds. But yeah, absolutely. All that prep of pushing sliders is automated with a preset for the base, highlights and shadow recovery. It makes the process very quick indeed.
@@archiphoto Is that something you could share or demonstrate in a video? I'm heading to the NZIPP show in Christchurch this August but unfortunately won't be there in time to attend your workshop. If you are going to be around the show for the duration though I would appreciate meeting up for a chat.
@Graham Murphy sounds good. Grab me a coffee ☕️ and I'm yours 😄
Why is your lumenzia panel different than the one I purchased?
When you open them into photoshop you very quickly arrange them ie too quickly and don't explain why Anthony as when i do this i'm getting most of the picture pixels deleted so it would be good if you could explain this more sklowly please,
Say you go shoot a real estate for a realtor. E.g. a house with 2 bedrooms, living room, etc. How much would you charge for this? I'm only interested as I know the market where I live is really competed and the prices have been driven to the ground. So any extra work in photoshop is just adding up to lost profits.
excuse me as I re watch this 10 times straight as I'm editing myself!!
faster to just let lightroom HDR them in lightroom. way faster. masking is all done for you.
if you insist on sending them to Photoshop you can send from lightroom to photoshop as layers then use autoaline and auto blend
Thanks for the thoughts on LR mere to HDR. Funnily enough my most recent vid starts with that approach th-cam.com/video/fJxM4s0PGmM/w-d-xo.html . Not sure what you mean that tha masking is all done for you though? It's only creating a 32bit HDR file. Apart from using the hacky auto settings globally, as editors it's still our job to bring back that dynamic range where we want it. Personally I don't find pulling the silders around on a global edit gives me the refined results my clients expect or deserve. But that's just my approach.
this seems like something AI will be doing in 10 years
I hope so.
Can someone finally explain wtf
“Muddy” actually means!?!?
No
A dirtying of pixel value, particularly in the midtones, resulting in a lifeless photo that doesn't have the brightness or vigour you'd expect from the real scene. Something like that anyway 😜