Breaking news guys, Adobe just released an update to Lightroom Classic (LrC). In LrC 9.3, batch HDR processing is possible from Stacks. The process is super simple, Auto-Stack by capture time. Adjust the capture time so that you have the right amount of stacks. Select all the Stacks and Photo Merge HDR. Bing, bang, boom, ya done.
I’ve previously used Photomatics’ Batch HDR plugin and it was very resource intensive. I could not do anything else while it was batch processing. It took ages to process. With the new built in batch HDR in LrC, in my latest job, it took 62 3-stack brackets and processed them within 30 minutes. I played some Link’s Awakening on my Gamboy Pocket, and partially cleared the Turtle Dungeon and the batch job was done. I was watching youtube with no issues and writing this up in between Link’s Awakening.
This is fantastic news. My workflow has simplified 10 fold. Hope you can use this in your own work. I know the community has been asking for it for a long time now. Cheers.
If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below or send me an email at hello@georgemoua.com
High Dynamic Range
5 Common Mistakes New Real Estate Agents Make and How to Avoid Them
Congratulations on getting your real estate salespersons license! Like most new agents you’re probably itching to get going selling homes. The great thing is that by reading this and researching the common pitfalls of new agents you’re going to be starting off on a stronger foot than those diving straight into it blindly. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 87% or Realtors fail within the first five years. There are a lot of reasons new agents fail, but here are five common reasons that contribute to the the NAR statistics and what you can do to get ahead of them.
1. Not treating your new venture as a legitimate business.
This goes for both your business and yourself. You are a real estate agent, a professional facilitator of real estate within your community — act like it. Most real estate agents who fail usually don’t have a business plan in place or don’t have reserve funds built up or a second income to float them through rough patches. The average homebuyer takes 30 to 45 days to buy a home, the average new agent closes their first deal within 3-6 months (longer if the market is in a downturn). That means for at least 4 months you’re not getting paid. For those 4 months you still need to pay rent, membership dues, bills, and so on. Not having a clear plan of action for your business will quickly eat away at any of your savings thus far. Not having any reserve funds means you won’t be able to cover your living expenses and will inevitably lead to dropping out of the real estate business.
2. Not generating leads/prospecting.
I know, it’s hard getting out there and meeting new people and making honest connections but your business relies on it. Most agents will advise against buying leads, but if your warm market is small or non-existent you need to start somewhere and even if you have a strong warm market, those leads will eventually dry up. Buy leads, cold call the FSBO list, go out with a branded shirt, hand your cards out, anything to get new leads or referrals. Simply, no leads = no income. So get prospecting.
3. Lacking any accountability to yourself and your business.
This is hard for me too, but when you run your own business you need to be accountable to get results. No sales usually mean you’re not prospecting enough or at all. You have to have a plan of attack daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. It can be as simple as, “I’m going to contact 10 new people today.” These goals need to be quantifiable and actionable because you need clear defined steps to achieve them. If you say you want your business to grow, you need to specify how you want it to grow. Do you want 10% growth in your income? Do you want to increase the number of homes you have under contract by 10%? Specificity and accountability help push and grow your business.
4. Being focused on the commission.
Firstly, you’re in the customer service business, not the sales business. Homes sell themselves, you provide a service by lending your knowledge of real estate, the community, and access to these homes. Always run your business with people first. It only takes one negative review to sour your business. And usually people can smell when you are worried more about the money rather than actually helping them find the right home in the right community. For them this is the biggest purchasing decision they’ll likely make in their lifetime, for you it’s just another client to help get into their dream home.
5. This last one is a big one. Being reactive instead of proactive.
Being reactive in business usually means you’re being passive, you’re comfortable with not extending your discomfort and you’ll likely miss how the markets trend. You’re not on top of current trends in neighborhoods, what your client demographic looks like, whether or not the market is a sellers or buyers market, or if there’s going to be a downturn in the market. This goes back to, both, being accountable to yourself and having a clear business plan. By knowing where you want to be and being on top of trends in real estate, you are always learning and pivoting to adjust any slight market trends. There are still a large percentage of real estate agents who can only be reached through phone. With the rise of millennial home buyers, these agents haven’t adjusted to their new client market and are getting, either, lost in the fold or frustrating their new clients. As Bruce Lee says, “Be water, my friend.”
Starting a new business is hard. You have to prepare for success if you want to establish a successful business. You're already off to a good start by researching mistakes previous real estate agents have made! Now get going on your business plan if you don't already have one. Prospect, prospect, and prospect some more. Focus on your goals and be accountable for your actions (if not to yourself, then to a designated accountability partner). Don't chase the money, focus on client needs and grow from there. And lastly, be proactive in your business and stay on top of trends to see where the market is moving so you can pivot before getting hit too hard.
Have another reason? Share your experiences in the comments below for others to gain from that experience!
When you're going to list a new clients home in Jacksonville, Florida, make sure to get professional photography for their home. Treat your clients well, and market their home as if you were marketing your own. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below or send me an email at hello@georgemoua.com.
Photography 101: Shooting Flambient
Flash photography is a great skill to learn as a photographer. It allows you to create mood, emphasis, and cleans photos. I’ve been a natural light shooter only because it always seemed so daunting a task to learn how to shoot with a flash. I’m writing this in part, for my younger self so as to not be as afraid as I was regarding flash photography.
As we discussed in our previous 101 write up, HDR has been used to great effect in interior photography and real estate photography when requirements state no flash, or conditions didn’t allow for flash. I’ll argue flash modified interior photography executed right will beat HDR any day. Flash photography allows for cleaner more accurate reproduction of colors, cutting harsh shadows from incoming ambient light (through windows and light fixtures), allows you to light rooms with little to know ambient light (closets, nooks, etc). All in all, flash photography gives you more flexibility in the worst of lighting situations. In a wood cabin with little to no available ambient light? Bring a white reflector and an AD200 or Wistro 600 and you’ll be able to accurately capture the correct colors, light the interiors, and save yourself from pulling your hair out from dealing with trying to merge an HDR bracket and keep colors correct.
What You’ll Need to Start Shooting with a Flash
To start adding flash into your interior photography all you need is a flash unit with a wireless trigger. The great thing is that you probably already have one in your bag and all you’ll need to do is pick up a wireless trigger. I started with a basic flash unit from Godox (Godox tt685s) and while it took a little longer to get through a house it served me well — I still carry it with me to help light rooms when my Godox AD200pro doesn’t have enough reach. In addition to the flash unit you may want to pick up a good set of c-stands to hold your flash. I don’t, but you may find it helpful.
Let’s Get Shooting
The Ambient Shot
The ambient shot is, simply, a shot with no flash. Typically, I expose to the right of the histogram—this is called Exposing-to-the-right (ETTR). Without getting too much into it, when shooting RAW the highlights data is usually well preserved. This means that you can easily pull blown out highlights back down and preserve the detail. Your camera typically struggles to capture and preserve shadow detail though, so that’s why I ETTR when shooting my interior ambient photos — to get the most data I can for post processing.
Let’s take a look at the ambient shot we’ll be using. You can see in the histogram that we’re slightly right of center in our histogram and the highlights look a little blown out. But again that’s fine, we can just pull down the highlights and boom, we’re back in business.
The Flash Shot
The flash shot is just the shot with the flash fired. Instead of shooting TTL you’ll be shooting in manual and adjusting power output to create a well exposed shot — if you’re looking at the histogram you’ll be in center. Before firing the flash you’ll want to set your camera’s exposure to expose for any window. If there’s no window start with a 1/125 of a second shutter speed and adjust again to get a centered histogram when the flash is fired.
Yes, it’s not the best explanation but them’s the breaks. There are no hard and fast rules so you can just set it up and go room to room, you need to develop an eye for lighting to build your ability to quickly move room to room with a flash.
Blending The Shots
With the Ambient and Flash shots loaded into Lightroom, we can make minor corrections before starting to blending the shots in Photoshop. I’m going to apply a lens correction and remove chromatic aberration. With distortion and CA corrected, I like to adjust the white balance and exposure as needed and tweak the overall image of both the Flash and Ambient shot.
Alright, so I can send the shots over to Photoshop now to do the blending by selecting the shots, right-clicking, and selecting “Open as Layers in Photoshop…”.
Before I start, I select both layers and auto align them.
Now that they’re aligned, I set the flash shot as the bottom layer. Then apply an inverted layer mask to the ambient shot.
With the layer mask selected, I select a soft brush tool selected with white as the primary color and set the flow to 5-7%.
I’ll just start brushing in the Ambient shot to bring back the natural luminance of the room. You don’t want to be heavy handed in brushing in the Ambient shot. I’m looking to make the shot look a bit more natural than the flash shot gives us.
Once I’m happy with the results, I’ll save the layers and close Photoshop. Back in Lightroom I’ll make any final adjustments and crop if I need to.
There you go, now you know how to shoot and edit a Flambient photo. The technique takes a bit to get used to but the post processing is usually a breeze when you dial in your shots. Hope you learned something, and if you have any questions, please feel free to comment below or send me an email at hello@georgemoua.com
Photography 101: Shooting HDR
High-Dynamic Range photography is a useful technique to capture scenes you otherwise couldn’t capture in a single exposure. It’s a technique that’s best applied while on a tripod, though you can get away with handheld HDR when your shutter speeds are fast enough. For photographic disciplines like landscape and architectural photography, HDR is a powerful tool to help capture a scene with the most information possible for post-processing.
The only cost to shooting HDR -- besides the camera and lens -- is the processing software. And there are loads of them; Lightroom/Photoshop, Photomatix, Aurora HDR, or Darktable. I regularly use Lightroom as my main HDR processor because I like the way it merges the exposures and it’ll give you finer control of the overall look. It doesn’t have batch processing but for the amount of HDRs that I output it’s fine.
Shooting HDR
Let’s do a quick equipment check first. What you’ll need is a camera with continuous bracket shooting (if your camera doesn’t offer this you can just adjust your shutter speed to create the separate exposures), a tripod (though you can get away with handheld HDRs when your shutter speeds are fast enough), and, optionally, a wireless shutter release cable or remote.
With your camera now setup on your tripod, let’s set it up for continuous bracketing.
If you shoot Sony
If you shoot Canon
If you shoot Nikon
If you shoot Fuji
If you shoot Panasonic
If you shoot Olympus
Let’s get to the shooting now. Frame up your composition and take the photos. Now you’ll have a minimum of 3 separate exposures with one stop of light difference between them (one at -1, one at 0, and one at +1).
Process an HDR
In this write up I’m going to be using Lightroom CC 2019 to process this HDR. It’s my DAM of choice because it offers so many tools to speed up my workflow without having to open up another program.
After firing up Lightroom, import your bracket set and only apply a simple lens correction profile.
Next, select the bracket set and click on the 'Photo' tab and select Photo Merge > HDR. I usually set the deghost to none, turn off auto-tune, and leave auto-align on.
With your HDR processed, now we can go and tune the processed image to look the way we want it too. What looks right is subjective so you’ll want to play around with the adjustment sliders to get an image you like. I tend to lean toward a more natural representation of the scene, but it’s all about intent — what do you want to say and how do you want the viewer to feel.
There you go, now you know how to shoot an HDR. The technique is simple, but the post processing can be a bit touchy because you can easily edit too much and make the photo look heavily unnatural. Check back soon for my flash photography write up and follow up video on how to shoot HDRs. Hope you learned something, and if you have any questions, please feel free to comment below or send me an email at hello@georgemoua.com
Photography 101: HDR vs Flash Photography
In real estate photography there are two styles of shooting interiors; High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Flash/Artificial Light. Each style has a different workflow and both can achieve stunning results. HDR has a lower cost of entry to start shooting, but there’s a software learning curve for producing stellar results. Flash photography has a marginal cost to start shooting, and a learning curve for both the software and the hardware. I wanted to provide a quick primer for those interested in real estate photography in this write up with follow up technical articles for HDR and Flash photography.
What is High Dynamic Range (HDR)?
HDR is a technique using multiple exposures of the same scene to increase the range between the highlights and the shadows represented in a photograph. Using HDR in real estate photography requires taking a minimum of five (5) exposures at -2, -1, 0, +1, and +2. Then, using an HDR processing software, you’ll combine these exposures to create an image with an image that closer resembles the way our eyes render the scene.
What is Flash Photography?
Flash photography is using artificial light to help illuminate the interior. Using a flash also helps to provide a consistent white balance to all of your photos. With real estate photography you’ll typically take three exposures; one without flash, one with flash, and, if you have a window in the scene, a flash against the window.
If you’re careful in your photography onsite and post-processing both can produce stellar results. However, in my experience, flash photography easily wins because it’s ability to better render the photographs reducing my post-processing work time. In addition to reduced workflow time, with flash photography you have more options as to when you can shoot and how you can render an interior. HDR is fine, but to me the way each particular software renders colors differently which inevitably leads to me spending more time than I want in post. Check back next week for an introduction to HDR photography!