Architecture and Real Estate Photography 3: Lighting Color Management

1. Intro to Color: Hi, I'm Charlie Borland. And welcome to my course on mastering architecture. In real estate photography, this is Part three. The focus of this particular course is lighting color management and how you deal with color in situations like mixed lighting, white balance, and then we'll cover a lot more. 2. Understanding Lighting Color Management: there's going to be times when you go out to photograph a particular building or property, and you're gonna be presented with some locations that are going to require you to basically do what we call manage your color. It's extremely important that you learn to not only understand how color works when it comes to lighting, but also how you convey balance your lighting sources So they all work together in a common color theme. The light that exists all around us is ambient light. Or, as we already know, the available light. The sun, the light from a street light and the interior lighting in the building are all considered ambient light sources because their continuous often these light sources are not the same color as in all being daylight, they'll have different kelvin temperatures. Each of these light sources, such as fluorescent sodium vapor, mercury vapour and incandescent, all have a different color spectrum Now. First, you might be wondering, Where am I going to rent into sodium vapor or mercury vapor lights? Because I'm a real estate photographer. Well, the answer to that question is, hopefully somebody's going to see your magnificent photography of various real estate properties that they're going to hire you to shoot commercial buildings, and you can charge more of a commercial photography rate. So that's why it's important to understand different lighting sources and their colors, and then how you can make them all work together for basically the common color. Good. When one of these is the main light source in the building, you are photographing and you're using daylight settings on your digital camera, you're going tohave, a color shift in the direction of that light sources. Color temperature, for example. Cool white fluorescent tends to turn green, while sodium vapors are very amber in color. And if you're using the daylight settings on your camera, you're going tohave a color shift either towards green with the fluorescent or amber leaning towards the sodium vapors color. Another example is if you're shooting a houses interior that has daylight coming through the windows with tungsten colored ceiling splits and also a large fluorescent fixture in the kitchen, you actually have three different color temperatures coming from these three different light sources. So the question becomes, which one do you set your custom white balance, too? Auto White balance does a pretty good job of compromising. But it's in this situation that the camera can be fooled if there's a heavy emphasis in one particular light. Sources color. For many photographers, setting the camera toe auto white balance is a pretty good solution, but it does not necessarily fix all the color. It just finds a compromise. And in situations like I just described, the result is less than optimal. The photographer has to spend quite a bit of time on the computer and in photo shop or other programs, adjusting the incorrect colors. If I was shooting for a home builder, for example, and one wall that is painted white actually has a color shift, they may ask, What am I doing? What if you're shooting for Miller paint in capturing home interiors? If the color balance is off due to the current light sources and makes that white paint off color, there lies another problem. And so this is what makes managing your color important end. In the end, it's not really that difficult. You essentially determine the color balance for the available lights as well as the mixed light coming in, and then make a determination on how to correct us, and I'm going to show you how to do it. As a photographer, you need to recognize color issues when you see them and take action to correct for it. If you're a digital photographer, you're certainly aware of auto white balance and custom white balance settings on your digital camera, and these can work pretty well, but only in a few situations. Take a look at this picture. Here's an example of lots of mixed light. We got daylight coming in through the windows, a fluorescent fixture in the kitchen and a tungsten fixture just to the right out of the picture. And what's the dining area? There's many ways to attack this mixed color situation here. The presets on digital cameras are rarely much help, either, and they are for J. Peg only anyway, not a raw file. And, of course, I hope you're shooting nothing but rob the color coming from the green fluorescent light in the kitchen, then mixed with a little bit of the day. Light colored window light creates a whole new color where there is no preset to fix. That fluorescent won't work, and daylight presets won't work because the color is some mixture of those two different light sources. There are other options that you can pursue to obtain good color balance within your scene . One, of course, is to overpower the ambient light with strobes and use fast shutter speech, which basically denies the ambient light from being part of your exposure. But this often results in an unreal looking photograph, because natural light coming through the windows, lamps and ceiling fixtures makes a room feel natural. Ambient light is a real light and often is needed on creating a photograph that's believable. So by eliminating that light in your scene, you create an unrealistic and unbelievable image. So in this next video, let's take a look at ambient light and how to correct its various colors. 3. Lighting Color Management #2: as I mentioned in the last video. Ambient light is available light and often light. You have no control over. Sometimes you could turn indoor ambient light off. But it's when you can't that making adjustments in your shooting approach are required to ensure good color. The color of light is rated in kelvin color temperature and daylight is 5500 k Tungsten is 3200 k and it's amber in color. Sodium vapour are very orange red, around 2100 k and metal. Hal. I'd are closer to daylight. Color temperature is an important in the fields of photography, where a color temperature of approximately 5500 K is required to match daylight color. There are different fluorescent lights, but the most common is cool white. It has a kelvin temperature of around 4000 K which is a little warmer than daylight, but it also produces a green cast. Fluorescence not only need a correction for the blue red shift but need filtration to bring the green part of the spectrum in tow line. In other words, make it look daylight For the sake of explaining color theory, this lesson illustrates points is if you were shooting with daylight colored film or daylight. White balance. This chart here shows you a light sources and their specific color temperatures. And as you can see, they range from very amber all the way up to very blue. But also in here is some daylight, just to give you an idea of warm sunrises and warm sunsets as well as midday color temperature. Let's say you go in first to photograph an interior. The first thing you need to do is determine how much a man like you want to use in your scene. Since you're shooting an architectural interior, then you will use ambient light to achieve a natural lighting feel. And you can control how much of that ambient light comes in with your shutter speed. Longer shutter speed. More ambient window light faster shutter speed, less ambient window light. So find the balance of the ambient light that you want coming in and set the shutter speed to that. Next. Determine what the color balance is before you even think about setting up your strobes. You could do this by looking at the light sources and the markings on the tubes, like the fluorescent tubes that are cool. White will say cool, white. If you happen to have a color meter, then, of course, that makes the job much easier and much faster as you walk around the room, measuring the different levels of color. Once you've determined where you will be photographing and know that you will be mixing your daylight strove with ambient light, you take a color meter reading to determine what you're dealing with. If you're reading is 4000 Kelvin that tells you that the light is warmer than daylight. Remember that tungsten is amber and rated at 3200 K So 4000 K is well on the way to becoming tungsten colored light. If you took a picture now with the daylight white balance setting on your camera, you're gonna have a slight amber cast to the overall scene. Now I'm going to stop for a moment and take a look at the color wheel. This is universal in its meaning and works here in photography quite well. I'm going to talk about how we used to correct color on our cameras before digital came in , and what we did is we added colored filters to our lens. If you're ambient light was green. Then you put a magenta filter, which is the opposite of green on your lens to eliminate the color shift. This principle works the same no matter what. If you had too much yellow, you added a blue filter to your lens and so on. Now, instead of adding a filter to your lens with digital photography, you basically set a white balance. Digital cameras, of course, make it much more easy. So in the next video, we're gonna look deeper at how to a correct for color on a digital camera. 4. Lighting Color Management #3: in the previous video, I talked very briefly about how you correct color on a film camera, and you do that by using filters. But now we're gonna look at how we do it with a digital camera, and fortunately it's a bit easier. I have found that digital cameras are really quite forgiving in respects to color shifts. When I think the background should really shift to a different color, it doesn't shift very much. However, this is little consolation if precise color is needed and you're gonna have clients that are going to expect that if you're shooting ah, home interior for an architect and there's mixed light, you cannot have blue light on a white wall, an amber light on the other side of the white wall with green fluorescent in the kitchen, and you get ready to start using your color settings on your digital camera. You're gonna want to make sure it has a full range of options. Some of the more amateur based digital SLR. So don't, for example, have manual white balance or even presets. So you want to make sure you have the ability to completely adjust your manual white balance. You can set the camera at a variety of different Kelvin temperatures to adjust for any ambient light color shift. Even though I'm shooting digitally, I still use my color meter from time to time. But then again, not always. The good part about the digital cameras I've alluded to is you don't have to put filters on the lens because you have all these white balance options. If you take a look at this picture, this is the screen from an old 40 D. I usedto have, and I believe that most digital cameras come with these features. The screen maybe a little bit different, but most of them have manual white balance options. And as I already mentioned, that's really important. If you look at the settings here, you can see that you have auto white balance in the upper left corner manual. White balance in the bottom, right corner, some presets in between, and then custom white balance. You can use any of these presets if you're in a lighting situation that has only one color but again for architecture and real estate photography that's extremely rare. To have one color in a room, there are dangers of course to using presets. For example, if you start shooting and window light is coming in and you used the incandescent preset for the ceiling fixtures, your light colors going to be off, especially the color of the window light coming through because it's not incandescent. So it's one reason I find the presets of little value because most of my situations I'm shooting in mixed life. So I find auto white balance to be a really good option, and I'm going to show you how I use that. I basically use auto, white balance or occasionally manual white balance, and it's going to depend on the room and on the situation. Now. Many people are big fans of custom white balance, but I'm not, and I will tell you why. This happens to be a very accurate method of achieving good color balance in some situations, but not always the problem. As I see it. For custom, white balance is again mixed lighting, which is really what this lectures air all about. It's mixed lighting, which you have in most interiors. If you select a custom white balance, what area of your scene do you set that custom white balance for the kitchen with its fluorescent light, the living room with its blue window light or the dining area with its tungsten colored chandelier. And that's assuming all three of these areas or part of your composition. Which one do you set the custom white balance for? There's the problem right there. You have to pick one, and you can go ahead and set that custom white balance in a position where you think the room or all these three different light sources. Air sort of blending together. But auto White balance does pretty much the same thing. So that's the main reason I'm not a big fan of custom white balance. Another option is the Y Bell card. Well, this is kind of like custom. White balance is well, but you can set this card in various parts of your scene. Take a picture with it there. Then you can go back later, and you can use photo shops, White balance tool to basically correct that area where the card is, and then you take, for example, those three different scenes. As I mentioned, the kitchen, seen the dining room and the living room all have this card in it with a specific exposure . Then you explained those three years together in a photo shop. Well, I think there's easier ways to do it, and I'm going to show you how. But it is another option. So in the next video, I'm going to show you how color meters work, and I'm going to expand Mawr on this mixed lighting theory. 5. Lighting Color Management #4: I will start by saying there's a lot of ways to get good color balance, but I think it's important in this course to show you as many different options as there are color. Meters are one of them, and I've had a model to color meter for 25 years that I used in the days of film. In those days, it was indispensable toe have a color meter. But today, again, with the digital photography, there are ways that you can still get good color balance. So I'm not saying Don't get a color meter If you're one of those photographers that really likes to have the right tools for everything, go ahead and get a color meter. And I highly recommend the say Connick digit pro see only color meter that's basically designed toe work with digital photography. Now these are not cheap tools, but they can save you some valuable time on the computer as long as they're used properly. As I mentioned, auto white balance and custom White Balance are the two most popular, so called perfect solutions. But some photographers do not have a complete grasp on what good color rece and the color meter will help you there. Now, back to the previous scenario. You have a client that you're shooting architectural interiors for, and you're shooting the kitchen. There's a big green fluorescent fixture in the ceiling and a tungsten chandelier in the dining area, right next to the kitchen that is spilling some of its amber light into the kitchen. Part of the scene which color you're going to set your white balance, too. Auto White balance will average the mix of color and will do a good job, but it does not fix color. It basically just averages thes three different color sources into a compromise exposure. And that means down the road, you're going to have to fix the color further in a image processing program like photo shop or light room. Already mentioned, custom White balance can do a pretty good job, but where do you measure for the custom white balance, the kitchen or the dining area? The client is hiring you because you're a pro and will provide technically accurate color of their room interiors, so it's important to get it right. The value of a color meter is as important today as it's ever been Despite all the digital tools available, it allows you to measure which light sources most dominant and then establish what is required to convert one source to another for an even color balance. And what I mean by that is correcting your supplemental light to match the average color in the scene. Now let me explain this diagram little more in depth. If you're using a color meter, where do you measure from? As you walk around clicking the meter to take a reading, you get an average of what the meter seas for that particular spot. It might for example, say 4000 Kelvin, where the yellow symbol is, and it might be 5000 kelvin where the blue symbol is, and it could be 3800 kelvin at the green area. As you walk around metering, getting close to the front window, right in the middle of the kitchen or in the dining area, make a mental note of the Kelvin temperature you see most common. Based on the above example, the average meter reading might be 4500 Kelvin. So what you want to dio is set your camera to 4500 Kelvin and take a test shot with manual white balance and then look at the color. This is a starting point, and if you notice too much color shift, then refine your settings and try again. So let me take that explanation a little further and show you what I'm talking about in this library at a college university. This image here shows the scene with mixed color, and you can see what the small squares look like. I've converted the photo to black and white, with the exception of the small squares, to show you how the color changed from close to the window to further away. The square on the left has more blue light coming through the window, and that means it appears less amber, while the square on the right has less window light and mawr ceiling light, and subsequently it's more amber. This particular image is the corrected color for the scene, or it happens to be the carpet. But most of the amber and most of the blue has been removed. The solution is to measure across the scene and determine what is the most dominant color, and then used the included color charts that I have in the course to jail your light sources to match that reading and then shoot either custom white balance image or an auto white balance image. The goal is to move from mixed light to common light. So what do I mean by that? Okay, you have window light coming in, but on the right side of the picture, there are lighting umbrellas and I basically go win and filter those to match the corrected color temperature, which is this image here right in the middle, and subsequently what would normally be off color on the right side of the scene is now going to be more corrected. 6. Lighting Color Management #5: Now, if you don't have a color meter, there's another technique you can use and is called using your camera as a color meter. Not very many photographers talk about this or do this, but it does work, and it will help you figure some things out. The main reason you're gonna want to do this is number one, as I just mentioned, you don't have a color meter and number two, you're using strobe lights or flashes on an interior, and you have a color shift inside and you want to match your flash or your strobes to that ambient light. So your final photographs will all be the same color The way you do this is you set your camera to auto white balance and you must be shooting in raw. When you shoot the raw picture, you're gonna open it up in photo shop, which means you gotta have a laptop with you, and you look at the color temperature that the camera captured the scene at. And, as you can see here, it's captured at 4100 Kelvin. Now there are some cameras out there that when you take a picture and raw, you can just look at it on the cameras LCD, and it tells you the color. Now I don't know which cameras those are, but I do know that in some cases that's available, I have a brand new canon camera as I'm creating this video, and it does not provide that information. When I look at the file on the cameras, LCD and I cycle through the metadata, so the only thing I can dio is take a picture immediately, have that sent to my laptop and then go in and open it up in adobe camera raw and see what color temperature it used. Once you do this, you then determine the proper lighting gels, which are going to be covered here shortly, and you apply those to your flash or your strobe lights. Now this is still not as precise is using a color meter, but it's certainly closer than the cameras, presets or simply guessing. The diagram here shows 4100 kelvin, so you would then take the charts in the documents that I provide and determine which gels to add your strobes to make them the same color as 4100 Kelvin. But as I said your camera might provide the Kelvin temperature data in a raw file right on the back of the camera L. C. D. So in that case, you don't need to jump through the hoops of having a laptop. So here's an image, by the way, that is an example of using one light source inside the room and where the camera as a color meter, would get you close. Sure, there's window light coming in, but if you point your camera to the left and block out the window when you take your test shot, you'll get an accurate reading. Up till now, have been primarily talking about getting good, accurate color readings of the indoor ambient light sources as well as any extraneous light sources that are coming in. But now it's time to look at adding strobes or flash to the mixture here, and I'm going to refer to strobes or flash simply as strobes. When you don't use any supplemental lighting, you simply take a color meter reading and then change the white balance on your camera, and you have basically neutralized any ambient color shift. When you add strop's to the mix, your now bringing in a daylight balanced light source and mixing that with other types of light sources that are going to be different colors. For example, if I had set my camera white balance to tungsten, but my strobes are not tungsten colored because they're 5500 Kelvin than the light coming out of them will be very blue because the white balance on my camera being set toe tungsten , which is 3200 Kelvin, is going to make all the light sources in this scene basically record under a Kelvin white balance. And that means light coming out of the strope, which is 5500 k will be very blue, not amber. To fix that problem, you add lighting jails or filtration to your strobes to make them the same color as the ambient light. So they basically match. Then when you set your white balance setting on the camera, for example, to 3200 any off color is now neutralized, and the strobe lights are the same color as the ambient light. This is where you use the either the Lee or the Roscoe color correction. Lighting gels to change the color of your strobe lights Now, these are the Roscoe brand lighting gels. If you prefer to use Lee, you're going tohave to do a cross calculation to find out which number of Aly gel matches which number of a Roscoe jail as an example. If the color temperature in a room is 4400. Kelvin, for example, you then set your white balance on your camera to 4400 Kelvin. And then you look at this chart, which is included and it says to put a Roscoe 3409 and a Roscoe 3 to 06 on each of your strobe lights. And this will make them both or all have the color temperature of 4400 Kelvin. Now why a blue gel and an amber gel? In this particular example, the reason is the 3409 is very amber and maybe a little bit to amber for 4400 Kelvin. So I add a very weak blue jail of 3 to 06 to the Amber Jail, and that lessens the amber of the original 3409 and it equals 4400 Kelvin. Okay, so now if you look at this chart, you're going to get an idea of the color of the gel based on the Roscoe Lighting Jail number and then somewhat what it's used for. For example, if you want to convert your strobe to cool white fluorescent, you would place a 3304 green jail over your light. And if you want to make a tungsten light or 3200 Calvin, you would add an amber gel of 3407 to your light. Here I can refer back to the color wheel and the opposite colors, like the opposite of red is Sai in the opposite of blue is yellow the opposite of green ISMM agenda. Well, it works the same way here with lighting gels. If you look at this chart, a blue 3 to 02 is the opposite color of an amber 34 zeros and a blue 3 to 08 is the opposite of 3409 The colors in each of these jails basically cancel each other out. I will mention that a 3401 and a 3407 from Roscoe are pretty close to being exactly the same jail. They both convert daylight to tungsten. But the 3401 converse to 3200 Calvin, while the 3407 converts to 2900 Calvin. And they're very close in color. Now, in case you don't know about Swatch books made by Roscoe, you can buy these from camera stores. This image here shows the variety of gels that come in these different Swatch books, and you can buy these from again any of the major camera stores online. And they're just a few dollars. But it shows you all the gels that are available. And I have used the Swatch books by putting the gel over my color meter when I'm doing some sophisticated color measurement, say, in an industrial plant or something like that. So it's one thing to go ahead and consider getting. If you're interested in seeing what all gels are available in the next video, we're gonna continue looking at color balance 7. Lighting Color Management #6: Okay, I'm going to start off by just giving you a quick look at off color images that I shot in my studio with no strobes in the first examples here. If you look at this first picture, it does show a color shift with the white balance set at 5500 K in a room or in my studio, which actually has a color balance of 4800 Kelvin coming from the fluorescent lights. So if you look closely at the paper that the products are sitting on a swell as the wall in the background, which are both white, you kind of see a yellow green cast. In this next example, I set the white balance toe fluorescent, which I select from the camera's preset white balance. Setting now is pretty accurate, and the exposure was F eight at half a second. It's not perfect color balance, but it's better now. I set up the camera to take a custom white balance reading by reading off the white card that was in the foreground. By the way, the image is a little blurry. Cause apparently shook the camera, but the color balance is almost perfect, certainly close enough for for most applications, and this would be I would consider a good exposure. So I used a custom white balance on the paper in the foreground and basically the colors neutralized. And the reason is, there's only one color in my studio, and it's fluorescent ceiling lights. Now, to give you an idea of how I attached jails, I basically just cut the Giles come very large. I cut them into small squares so they fit over the dish or the reflector of my strobes, and then I just clamp him with a clamp. You can get some clips that are designed for holding jails, by the way, and those air usually made by the manufacturers but during the clips break after a while. So then, on this last picture here, the ambient light was set on the digital camera using manual white balance. Then the strobes were jelled, like in the previous picture to match the ambient light, and the result is a perfectly neutral color image. Now, one more thing, and here's a key point to understand the way you do. This is you read the ambient light's color with your color meter or again using the technique of using your camera as a color meter. Then you picked the gels that a color shift in the room, and you add those jails to the strobe, so they are the same color as the ambient light. And again, you can determine this by the Pdf chart that I've included. And finally you set white balance on your camera to match the ambient room color, and you will have good color in your images. Now, another thing that was a lot more popular early in the days of shooting large format architecture with ambient light on film was to jail the fixtures in rooms to make them all the same. And son photographers still do that. I'm not talking about your strobes, but I'm talking about lamps, windows, ceiling fixtures, all having color gels put on them to make them the same color so that you don't have toe mess around with jelling lights and that sort of thing. I don't do this. Some people still do, and it's certainly a technique that works. But talk about increasing the amount of work to photograph a room. If you're a real estate photographer that you know time is money and you're not going to have clients that are gonna be willing to pay you to take the time to convert all the interior lighting to a specific color. Maybe if you're shooting for high end architect or, ah, high end Architecture magazine, they will allow you the time to do that. But not when you're shooting real estate. So basically, the way this works is you open up the lighting fixture and you place the appropriate lighting jail inside the lighting fixture to convert that bulb to the color that you're seeking to achieve. Let's say, for example, you were going to convert the kitchen fluorescent fixture, which happens to be cool. White is. You would open up the fixture and you'd put a 33 10 gel in there and then close the fixture . This makes the cool white fixture tungsten in color and would then match all the tungsten lights that air in the rest of your scene again. Just a hypothetical example. If the dining room was tunks in, the kitchen is now tungsten, and all that remains is the blue coming in from the windows, and you would then put gels over the windows to make them tungsten colored. If you're using strobes in the same situation, then you turn around in jail, your strobes to be tungsten colored as well, and you're pretty much all set now. You're probably going agree right off the bat. That's a tremendous amount of work when there are other options. One thing I believe is that tungsten colored lamps need tohave a good amber glow coming out of them. So I don't really want to correct that warm amber glow because that gives a feeling of warm ambience to the room. So I like to kind of leave those alone. But you never know. There may be a client who's going to come in and say, Oh, that's to orange. Please, please lessen the amount of orange, and you're just going to take one of your lighting gels and go inside the lamp shade and wrap it around the lamp and clamp it to change the color. Okay, we're gonna move on to the next video, which is our last video on lighting color management 8. Lighting Color Management #7: Okay, well, we've spent a fair amount of time learning about lighting color management. So I like this last lecture to sort of be called color lighting men event in the real world , you may have been sitting there watching these videos and think, What the heck with all this techno mumbo jumbo, I'll just correct. And raw converter or adobe camera wa Well, can you now? The answer, in my opinion, is yes and no. If the color shift for your entire scene is the same meaning your entire room interior is, say to Amber, you can go into adobe camera raw and using the color temperature slider. Make a global adjustment and problem solved. But if you're seeing has windows and daylight coming in and fluorescent fixtures spilling green all over and tungsten light in the back, then these adobe camera rocked. Global corrections won't do the job, so sure, you can make selections in photo shop and change the color of each of these areas that happen to be off. But this could be very difficult and time consuming. And of course, time is money. But think about this when you pour a can of blue paint into a can of red paint where those two colors mix, you're going to begin to get a color close to magenta in the middle. It will be blue, and the outer edges of the can will still be red. But where it mixes will begin to become magenta. The same theory works with light. If you have amber, tungsten light in one room and green fluorescent another room, there will be another color where those two colors transition. Why not just gel your lights and everything is balanced and equal in color? Then you confined tune with global Corrections in Adobe Camera Rock. So now let's take a look at the situation that I've used an example in many of my explanations, which is the rooms kitchen dining that has tungsten in the dining room, fluorescent, the kitchen and window light. If you have a color meter, you would want to first turn off the ceiling lights and then stand under the kitchen light and take a reading, and this will tell you what light is coming through the window. Make note of that particular reading. Now turn on the fluorescent fixture and read again, and this is the Kelvin temperature you're gonna want to set in your camera's manual white balance. The reason for that is it's difficult to jail windows, especially when you're looking at him. You're going to simply see the jails. So as an example, let's say the color meter, said 4500 Kelvin with the ceiling light in the kitchen. So the strobe lights that I'm using that are going to shine into the kitchen are going to be jelled at 4500 K Now, as you look at this image, the tungsten chandeliers on the right side, which you don't see in the picture, are really mixing in terribly and turning everything amber pink. And so this right here is a good example of an incorrect reading for the room, as the color temperature is very, very tungsten. So what I would dio is I would take the strobes that lit the backs of these chairs in the foreground, and I would convert them toe 500 Kelvin, because that's what the color meter says. So in the end, what I ended up doing in this difficult situation is the strokes that were hitting the kitchen were converted to 4500 Calvin and the strobes that were hitting the dining area here were jelled at 3500 and this gave me a much better balanced room as far as the color is concerned. I used auto white balance and then went into photo shop, which I consider to be my best friend and created a few color adjustments to get the entire rooms to be closer in color than they were in the previous examples. And it worked pretty well. The real point, however, is to get it right in the first place. This photo shop required a lot of time, and I was not paid for it. Why? Because I can light it correctly, and because I failed to do it perfectly, the client shouldn't have to pay for it. So I'm gonna finish off by what I call the shock assessment. Now that you're totally we bewildered and stunned a perceived complexity of color management in your lighting. Take a deep breath and relax. How long until you are confronted with this type of situation? Do you understand the theories presented here? Take your time and watch these videos over as many times as necessary until it all makes sense. Then go challenge yourself by practicing because practice makes perfect. Once this has sunk in, it will make perfect sense, just like all the other aspects of photography that at one time were also bewildering. Finally, keep in mind that how much you mess around with color is influenced by who you are shooting for real estate or architecture photography. You can make a quick color fix and photo shop using layers in Photoshop designed to fix color and their arm or lectures coming up on how to do that. So that's a wrap on our color, and I hope it all made sense. 9. Shooting HDR: okay, What I'm gonna talk about right now is exposing for HDR or high dynamic range image processing. This is a really good tool and very valuable, whether you're photographing landscapes or here I have some real estate in architecture photos. It can be used in a lot of different ways that can also be used for effect, Aziz what a lot of people call grunge. And this is also a popular technique, and you can use it to greed, backgrounds behind portrait's all kinds of stuff. What I'm gonna talk about right now is just getting good exposures here primarily with some real estate photos, because we have some pretty contrast he scenes. So this is Siris of images that I captured for real estate. And it's a family room and kitchen. This is what I call my base exposure. And what I mean by that is that this is the exposure that has the best hissed a gram. So let me open this up in adobe camera raw and show you exactly what I'm talking about. Here you can see the hissed. A gram is pretty well centered between the blacks and the whites over here, so I call this my base exposure and I'm going to bracket from there. Now you notice that on the right side here, the whites are hitting the wall and clipping and have the highlight indicator on right here . And it shows that loss of detail in the windows and the lamps. Well, this is to be expected because it's a scene that it's too has too high of a dynamic range to fit all within one capture. And that's exactly why we do. HDR. My next exposure is going to bring these highlights off the wall and get a good exposure for this area over here. But it will be at the expense of the shadows than our next exposure will be a longer exposure, which means more details at added to the shadows. And that will put more detail in this area here of the hissed a gram, it means a lot more is going to be hitting the wall. But that's OK because we're now in that case, going to be doing the exposure. So let me show you again. This is our normal one. And if you look right here, this is 10.6 of a second. Okay, Here's my next exposure. This is minus one and 2/3 stops. Normally everybody says Just go to I tend to go about one and 2/3 and it's just to get myself a little bit of flexibility in the exposure. In case when I'm using aperture priority mode, the shutter is off a little bit or the metering changes I should say, OK, so 1/5 of a second at F 11. So this is obviously dark. This has the detail in the window. So let's open that one up and take a look at the history. So this is the one that basically pulled everything off the window for the most part. And, uh, this is pure white outside. This is recoverable detail right here because I could just go win and pretty much do that and save the the raw file that way. And so that's a minus one and 2/3. But you can see that I've recovered the highlights for the most part as I pull them off the wall and that put all the detail in the shadows. Which course isn't going to be any good for exposing for the shadows, but it did help the highlights a lot. Okay, so now the next exposure is the plus one and 2/3 or I'm just gonna call it round it off two plus two. So if I open that one up, you can see that the highlights are all blowing out. But look here, there's nothing is hitting the wall and clipping. So I'm not losing any shadow details. You don't see any blue in the darkest areas. And so that means I've got all the detail. So that's my three exposures for this image, and it's all set up and ready for HDR processing. Okay, so now I have a different home interior here, and I'm using homes because there is extreme contrast when you're trying to recover detail in the shadow areas. Now, there are some say that there's been some testing that you actually get a better result. If you bracket in one stop increments rather than a minus two and a plus two, you're going to get, you know, really a better file, according to some people. Okay, so now here is another property, and I'm choosing architecture because there is when you got windows, there is extreme contrast, so The deal here is to find which one is going to be the best exposure or what I call the base exposure. I've chosen this one here F 16 at one second. So if I open this up in camera raw, I'm not really clipping much. And I mean, I am clipping, but clipping the windows is to be expected in cases like this. But I've got, um you know, pretty good detail in the areas here. That's all very much recoverable and usable. And I'm not under exposing too much, even though all the data is sort of centered in the lower part. So the good part is, I have other images because I am bracketing for HDR. So one second at F 16 is my base exposure. So then I did a plus one, which is two seconds, and it did a plus two, which is four seconds, and that makes sure that I've got detail in the darkest areas, which pretty much the floorboards under here. So you now you can see the hissed a gram. There's not up anything really hitting the wall in the black course. I'm blowing out all the highlights, but that's okay. that's what HDR is all about. Now I got a minus one. This is a minus two. This is a minus three and this is a minus four. The reason I did that is I want to capture detail outside the windows. So this is an image or a scene that has extreme dynamic range or extreme contrasts. And now I'm going to be using seven exposures here in my HDR processing for this scene simply because that's how extreme the situation is. Like the previous real estate photo, I could have gone another minus one on that one to make sure I had no clipping in the windows. But there's so little detail being seen through there because it's a white wall outside and it's gonna blow out anyway that I don't worry about it too much. The other thing is, that was done for real estate. So I'm really cautious of how much time I spend on real estate photos to keep myself profitable. So again, this scene was shot for a builder who builds these homes and want to make sure I'm giving them very high quality photography. So that's pretty much exposing for HD are but I will throw in the last minute that I do bracket and use HDR for landscapes and hear Ghost towns of body California got 1/20 of a second, an 80th which is minus two and 1/5 which is my, which is plus two. So it works very well for outdoors images as well. Again, you're just increasing the dynamic range and getting really better images when you do that . So a couple more examples of this old church bracketed lots. Probably in one stop increments, I'm sure So So, anyway, there you go. That is exposing for HDR. Set your base image than overexposed until you've moved the shadow detail inside the hissed a gram pretty well and then under exposed. So you've pulled the highlights off the wall and closer to mid tones, and then the HDR software will put it all together for you.