Bracketing: HDR, and AEB for succesful real estate photos

What is bracketing in photography?

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 terms like AEB, and HDR but what does each of these terms mean?

AEB or Auto-Exposure Bracketing

AEB or Auto-Exposure Bracketing means the camera will take multiple shots of the same scene at different exposure levels.

When using AEB, you end up with multiple photos of the same scene that can later be combined into an HDR photo.

Exposure Blending

The initial point of AEB was allowing the photograph to choose which shot was best.

But smart photographers took inspiration from how the brain works and used their tools for creating a single image by choosing some pixels from each of the brackets captured using AEB.

And doing this they were able to create an HDR image: an image that could have details in both highly lit and poorly lit areas.

HDR or High Dynamic Range photos

HDR or High Dynamic Range photos are pictures in which multiple shots are algorithmically combined  into one that shows a bigger spectrum of the darkest darks and the brightest brights of a scene, providing more details.

In this way the photograph has a higher range of contrast than the original camera could technically achieve and mimics how the human eye would see the scene in real life.

SmartFusion

Nodalview goes even one step further: not only do we do AEB with your phone and Exposure Blending on our server, but we also tuned that blending specifically for real estate photography.

And we did not stop there neither:

• we are also fixing the perspective ensuring that parallel lines stay parallel even when using a wide angle lens,
• we are correcting the balance of colors because the context in which you are when looking at a picture is not the same as the context when the picture was shot,
• we are adapting the white balance because your brain would have taken into account the color of the carpet if you were in the room but it does not do the same when you look at an image on your phone, etc.

SmartFusion covers all the correction we automatically apply to make the mental image of looking at a picture as close as possible as the mental image you would have produced being in the room.

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

The limits of HDR

The stock HDR mode of your camera 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 our SmartFusion technology reproduces the composition performed by the human eye using improved exposure bracketing. In contrast to normal capture, the dynamic range of exposure is wider, allowing more detail to be captured in the image, resulting in more realistic shot.

Smart  selects, for each shot, only what it needs to blend in with the other elements of each image. Our real estate photography solution Nodalview uses 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.