4.4.2
4.4.2 Rear Window of Room 822 (with PhotoEngine & Photoshop) Let’s move on to a real classic: the beauty shot of an interior with a window to the outside. What most people regard as a worst-case scenario is the daily bread for professional real-estate photographers. And just as Michael James revealed in the interview earlier, HDR techniques come in very handy here. The tough question is, How far can you take the look and still stay true to the location? My particular example, room 822 of the Chelsea Hotel, illustrates this problem pretty well. It is a moody, dark room with orange walls and warm interior lighting, which stands in strong contrast to the cold evening light coming through the windows. There is an opulence of playful detail in the furniture, in plainspeak referred to as kitsch, paired with the very expensive kind of grungy run-down charm. It’s sort of the architectural equivalent of an haute couture punkrock T-shirt. The challenge is now to strike a bal-
ance between compressing the dynamic range, recovering details, maintaining the mood, and exposing that certain glam rock flair. This tutorial will introduce you to Oloneo PhotoEngine and a useful generic trick for problem solving in Photoshop. The image happens be to a panorama again; that’s why it shows such an unusual wide angle. The left and right sides of the image are actually opposite walls of the room. Workflow-wise, the image went through the same processing steps as the shot from the last tutorial. Multiple bracketing sequences were batch-merged to HDR in Photomatix and then stitched together in PTGui. This image uses a Vedutismo projection, which is a special panoramic perspective inspired by seventeenth century paintings, and has the special property of keeping architectural lines straight. If that spurs your interest, definitely check out Chapter 6. For now it shouldn’t really matter where the HDR comes from.
Figure 4-57: Room 822 of the Chelsea Hotel, New York. Madonna lived here before she got famous. Avid fans might recognize the location from her book Sex.
Workflow Examples
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