Bracketing: HDR, and AEB for succesful real estate photos

What is bracketing?

Bracketing is a technique that consists of taking several photos in bursts with different settings between each shot so that you can then select the best photo.

When it comes to real estate photography, exposure bracketing is particularly interesting. It consists of taking pictures with different exposure settings. The objective is to cover a wider dynamic range of exposures, with overexposed, underexposed, and correctly exposed photos.

Exposure bracketing for real estate photography

The brightness of a property is one of the most important search criteria for buyers. It is therefore fundamental to be able to highlight the light of your properties. However, the task can sometimes be particularly complex.

Indeed, unlike the human eye, cameras are unable to capture the great differences in lighting between very bright and very dark areas. A room lit by sunlight is dazzling, but will give a white sky and a dark foreground. Modern cameras allow us to find the right exposure compensation for each shot, but the technology is not as advanced as our eyes.

Exposure bracketing is one way to overcome this limitation. It allows you to capture the same scene several times with different settings and then merge them together later.

Bracketing is generally associated with HDR and AEB, but what does each of these terms mean?

AEB or Auto-Exposure Bracketing

This is the basic method used to obtain HDR photos. It consists of taking multiple shots of the same scene at different exposure levels.

HDR or High Dynamic Range

HDR is the technique that allows you to superimpose the different clicks to create a new photo. The stacking of photos in HDR is done via an algorithm.

HDR is a practical solution for agents because the stitching of photos is fast and automatic. However, the result is not always up to standard.

The limits of HDR

The assembly in HDR has bad press. One often reproaches it an artificial rendering and an effect with no very realistic colors. This is due to the fact that, apart from adjusting the HDR mode parameters, there is not much that can be done to influence the quality of the composite HDR image. In most cases, the result of the HDR mode is not comparable to what you can achieve by manually modifying AEB images.

New solutions exist

Today artificial intelligences reproduce the assembly performed by the HDR algorithm using improved exposure bracketing. In contrast to HDR, the dynamic range of exposure is wider, allowing more detail to be captured in the image, resulting in more realistic shots.

Artificial intelligence selects, for each shot, only what it needs to blend in with the other elements of each image. Solutions such as Nodalview use this new process. Because artificial intelligence has a more detailed processing of the different exposures, it will only take a few seconds to obtain a final rendering.

As you can see, exposure bracketing is essential to the success of your real estate photos. You know now how it works and the existing solutions. To choose the most suitable method, you will have to balance the results you expect and the practical aspects of each solution.