Often overlooked, it’s equally important to have post processing software that can bring out the best parts of your photograph. This extends far beyond having top of the line lenses or a steady tripod. With the increased emphasis on photography in the real estate market, it’s more important than ever for photographers to have the tools necessary to put them ahead of the competition and capable of producing the best end product possible. In short – the better the picture, the quicker the sale. Studies have also shown that the quality of a house or apartment’s photographs have a significant influence on how long it remains on the market. Statistics prove that people are heavily influenced by pictures (as oppose to written descriptions) when it comes to making housing decisions. I’ll let you decide.When it comes to selling a house, cameras are a real estate agent’s single most useful tool. I’d have to say though, it was a lot less arduous than endlessly changing settings in Photomatix to get things looking right, and I like the end result better, but I suppose on the flip side, this means less control and less creative input from the user, and on the odd occasion, you just can’t beat a nice HDR. I must admit though, to get the images looking their best, a little ‘fill light’ in Lightroom helps, and adding contrast and saturation layers also helps bring out the best in the Fused images I created.
With no tweaking at all, a pretty reasonable final image is spat out of Enfuse.
These programs utilise Exposure Fusion by stitching and fusing bracketed sequences together, with some pretty nice results.ĭie-hard HDR fans may not be too impressed by this new revelation, but I certainly am. If you’re into photo stitching then PTgui and Hugin may be of interest to you. There is currently no plugin for Photoshop.
However, the plugin is donation-ware so its limited to 500px final images until you donate to get the full version. It still uses the command line utility in the background (you have to tell it where your enfuse.exe is), but the process looks more refined. If you’ve got Lightroom then one of the more convenient ways is to use the plugin. Ingemar Bergmark has produced a GUI for it, not surprisingly called EnfuseGui, which can be a little easier if you aren’t too keen on command lines.
Not only that, but due to the algorithm used in Exposure Fusion, halos around objects that would otherwise ruin a nice HDR image have been completely eliminated, resulting in a more natural looking final image.Įnfuse is the primary tool for Exposure Fusion at the moment, and although it is a command line utility, there are ‘ ‘droplets’‘ (batch files) available that you can drag and drop a series of images onto to create a fused image. Using this process actually has a few advantages over HDR.įor one, no intermediate HDR image needs to be created, and therefore no tone mapping step is required either, making Exposure Fusion a far more efficient and quicker process. And because Exposure Fusion relies on these qualities, no exif data is required, and indeed, if you wanted to, you could include an image with flash to bring darker areas to life. Or more technically, the fusing process assigns weights to the pixels of each image in the sequence according to luminosity, saturation and contrast, then depending on these weights includes or excludes them from the final image. In short, EF takes the best bits from each image in the sequence and seamlessly combines them to create a final ‘Fused’ image. Exposure Fusion is a fairly new concept that is the process of creating a low dynamic range (LDR) image from a series of bracketed exposures.