When shooting interiors, and relying on HDR to solve the lighting challenge, not only do you need to balance the luminance values of the outside light and the interior light, but you also need to balance the light temperatures from the two or more light sources. There are many approaches to this, and here is one I recently used.
When shooting this interior shot, I knew that I would have to balance the cooler outside light with the warm interior lights, so I took multiple exposures with my camera’s light balance settings adjusted for both. I thought I would easily just blend in the two versions and be finished. But it didn’t quite work out that way.
Quite often, when using HDR to shoot interiors, the tone mapping process (when using a local operator like the Detail Enhancer in Photomatix) will leave sections of white walls looking dark and dirty. And that is what happened here. So I needed to also tone map a version of the image using the Tone Compressor operator, which gives walls a much cleaner and smoother look. (Sometimes you can benefit using this operator with clouds in landscape photography.)
But I only wanted to use this smooth version for the back wall. For the windows, which were way too blue, I needed another version:
And lastly, for the bar and furniture, I wanted to use a very aggressive version of the Detail Enhancer.
After opening all three HDR files, I decided to use the version with the Tone Compressor operator as the base layer. I then loaded the image with the correct outside light balance as the second layer. With a simple layer mask and some Overlay Blend Mode painting, I was easily able to blend the two images together.
I then created a third layer from the over-the-top Detail Enhancer tone mapped version, which I scaled back with the opacity slider after brushing it in the areas I wanted, which again, was mostly the furniture.
Here is the finished version.
Mixing Warm and Cool Light Sources
When shooting interiors, and relying on HDR to solve the lighting challenge, not only do you need to balance the luminance values of the outside light and the interior light, but you also need to balance the light temperatures from the two or more light sources. There are many approaches to this, and here is one I recently used.
When shooting this interior shot, I knew that I would have to balance the cooler outside light with the warm interior lights, so I took multiple exposures with my camera’s light balance settings adjusted for both. I thought I would easily just blend in the two versions and be finished. But it didn’t quite work out that way.
Quite often, when using HDR to shoot interiors, the tone mapping process (when using a local operator like the Detail Enhancer in Photomatix) will leave sections of white walls looking dark and dirty. And that is what happened here. So I needed to also tone map a version of the image using the Tone Compressor operator, which gives walls a much cleaner and smoother look. (Sometimes you can benefit using this operator with clouds in landscape photography.)
But I only wanted to use this smooth version for the back wall. For the windows, which were way too blue, I needed another version:
And lastly, for the bar and furniture, I wanted to use a very aggressive version of the Detail Enhancer.
After opening all three HDR files, I decided to use the version with the Tone Compressor operator as the base layer. I then loaded the image with the correct outside light balance as the second layer. With a simple layer mask and some Overlay Blend Mode painting, I was easily able to blend the two images together.
I then created a third layer from the over-the-top Detail Enhancer tone mapped version, which I scaled back with the opacity slider after brushing it in the areas I wanted, which again, was mostly the furniture.
Here is the finished version.