And today we are going to use Lightroom to blend some real estate

photos together. Now if you haven't set up Lightroom, I would highly

suggestion you head over to TipsForRealEstatePhotography.com and

look for the post called Software Setup for Post Processing. That should

get you on your way for what we are going to cover in this tutorial. So

let's go ahead and open up Lightroom and we are going to create a new

catalog for this particular job that we are doing. So, I always create a new

catalog within the directory of the particular shoot. So all of my real

estate shoots have their own directory. And I name the catalog after the same

name of the directory that I am putting it in to. You can check out some of my

naming conventions and the way that I organize my files at

TipsForRealEstatePhotography.com. After we click create, Lightroom is

going to go ahead and create a new catalog for us, and the first thing we are going

to want to do is import all of our photos from the real estate shoot. I have put

them in an originals folder, and once we click on it we can see all of the photos

from the shoot. Now this is actually a good photo shoot to go over because there

are a lot of color issues with lighting so we'll make some adjustments during the

post processing example here to kind of show you some of the things you can do

to help solve some color temperature issues. What I'm going to do is, we can

see all of our brackets here. I've got seven photos for this particular frame,

I have seven more down here, and what we are going to do is we are going to go

through and we are going to uncheck photos that I don't need. Photos that I

don't need are going to be ones that are way underexposed or way overexposed. So

I'm going to go ahead and uncheck the ones that are underexposed, because we probably

don't need them. It's not going to hurt if we have them in there, but the least amount

of photos that we pull in, the quicker it's probably going to run, and I know

just based off experience that I don't actually need those lower exposures. Now

you can try them if you want... What I'm actually doing here is when I'm clicking

on a particular frame, I'm holding shift and I'm clicking on my second frame, and

then I'm hitting the tilde key, that's right underneath escape. The top left.

That's the shortcut to uncheck those photos that you have selected. So let's

go through here and uncheck these. Now this one right here, this photo here

just from glancing at it, it looks pretty overexposed, but I think it's going to be

fine so we are just going to remove these two lower exposed ones and just continue

our trend with what we are doing by removing the bottom two. Now this one,

this one actually looks way, over exposed to me. So I'm going to go ahead and leave

that one out of the selection, and then so I'll be actually removing one that's

under exposed and one that's over exposed. Again this is to end up with a five

bracketed shot. A five exposure bracketed shot. Same with this one, I'm going to

remove the lowest and the highest one. Or the darkest and the brightest I guess

you would say. Continuing on... Just going down the list here of all of the photos

that I have. Again just if it's.. I'm basically my, what my eye is doing is I'm

looking at this exposure, the brightest exposure and I'm asking myself, is it too

bright? If it is, then I'll remove it plus I'll remove the least exposed shot. If

it's not too bright, if I think a lot of detail is still there then I'll just go

ahead and keep it and I'll remove the two under exposed shots in the set. So we are

almost through here getting through.. getting toward the master bath here and

some of the guest rooms. Now we are to our exteriors. Now, what I normally do

with these, is I normally edit usually a single frame, sometimes I will blend

them together. It normally depends on the wind. If it's really windy outside

I try to use a single frame for editing because when you blend them together

if you have trees, the branches and leaves are going to be blowing in the

wind so when you blend them together they get blurry. So I'm going to go

ahead and keep just a single frame for these. That was the back yard, these

two photos here. This last group of three, this is the front shot that I

have and I'm actually going to blend these together, so I'm not going to

use this one right here because it is so bright and over exposed, but I am

going to use this one, and I'm going to use this one and I'm going to

blend them together. And that's just a personal preference. You could

probably get away with just taking this darker exposure and you would

be able to modify and edit this to get to a nice image. But I'm going

to go ahead and blend them together. So, after we have all of our photos

selected that we want to import into our catalog - let me bump

this down a little bit - we are going to go over here to the setting where

it says apply during import. And I'm going to click on develop settings

and I'm going to go to user presets and click on Auto Lens Profile. Now

this is actually a profile that I made during the previous post on

setting up the software for post- processing so go check that out

to see what it is doing. And for meta data I'm going to select

UEP which is my business name which is Unique Exposure Photography

that has my copyright information, my name in there and that type of

thing. These two pieces of information are going to be applied to all of the

photos that we import. So let's go ahead and click import, and it's

going to pull them all into our catalog. And we are going to scroll

all the way to the bottom. And we are going to start at the end. And I'll

show you why here in a second. What I'm going to do is I'm going to actually

pull all of our frames and put them into stacks. Because when we have them

in stacks, that how the enfuse plugin is going to know which photos to blend

together. So, the reason that I go backwards is because A, it's easier

the way that the user interface works when I stack these together, when I

stack these together it's easier and quicker for me to go backwards. But

also, whatever image you have selected first in the stack, so you can see that

this one down here number thirty-four, that one is a little bit brighter than

this one, one-thirty-three. That, this first image that I selected is actually

going to become the top of the stack. So I want the brightest image to be on

the top of the stack because that's going to be most visible to me once

all of my photos are stacked. Now in order to stack them together, I'm going

to go up to, Photo stacking and group into stack. Now I normally just use the

shortcut code so that's why it took me a little bit to find this but, if you

just want to figure out how to apply that particular shortcut code it will go

a lot quicker rather than using the menu. So when I stack them together you'll see

that it bunches them together. I have two photos in this stack. And I'm just

going to go down the line and for all of my photos I'm just going to stack

them all together. So for each room, we just go from the brightest shot

to the darkest, and we use our shortcut code, or our shortcut key to group them

together. And you'll see that my first image of the stack that I select which

is the brightest one, that ends up being the top photo of the stack. And that's

what we want because it looks the best, it's easier to see what shot it is.

So after we have all of these stacked together, now what we are actually

going to do is we are going to go through and adjust the color

temperature. So, I'm going to start and I'm going to right click and I'm

going to go to stacking and I am going to expand all stacks. So it's

going to open them all back up again. I scroll down to the bottom,

and I click on my first photo in the stack and I hold shift and I click

on the second one, so I'm selecting both stacks. I'm going to go ahead

and click on this photo right here so I have that one selected, and I'm

going to go to develop, and once this pulls up, I'm going to make sure that

at the bottom here, that it says Auto Sync. If I click this little toggle

switch and it says Sync here, that means that it is not going to Auto

Sync the photos that I have selected. So I want to toggle it to make sure

it says Auto Sync. And all I'm going to do here is I'm going to adjust

the color temperature. Now it actually looks fine, so I don't really need

to do anything. OK so when we move over to our first set, again I'm going

to click on the first exposure here in this stack, I'm going to hold shift

and click on the beginning exposure over here. So I have all of the photos

in the stack selected. I'm going to adjust the white balance by clicking

on the eye dropper tool and clicking on something that I know is white

from the photo. And then I'm just going to make some personal adjustments

based off of how it turns out. You might prefer something warmer, you

might prefer something cooler. Clicking on the eye dropper is just a way to, as

a starting point, and you as the photographer can make the further or

more detailed white balance adjustments as you see fit. Again, make sure that

you have Auto Sync showing here or else it will not sync across all your

photos. So I'm just going to go through and click on to adjust the temperature

for some of these. Now, sometimes what happens is, since we aren't using

any additional lighting here, and we're just using the light that is available

to us, we will have a lot of cold light or blue light that comes in from outside.

And it can put a lot of blue into our particular photo. Now this one is not

too bad, but you can see some of these areas up here get a little blue. The

way to fix that, is you can go down to saturation, and you can hit and take

down the saturation of the blue channel. Now obviously if there are a lot, if there

is a lot of blue in that particular room, if the walls are blue, or if the

furniture is blue, you want to be really be careful on how much you actually make

that adjustment because you are going to be making that adjustment to the entire

blue channel. So I'm just looking to try to find where to put the eye dropper

tool and that looks OK but it just looks a little purple to me, so I'm going to

drop, drop it down, add a little green into it. And again this one, just based

off of looking at these thumbnails, I can see quite a bit of blue in there.

It's not too bad, but it's enough to make me want to come down and go to

saturation and knock it down a little bit. And again all of those settings

are going to be synced across all of the photos.

You'll notice in this one here I actually have my camera showing. One of the tips

that I can give you is if you doing a bathroom where you have no choice

but to be in a mirror, try to be in the mirror where the background is a

solid color. You can see here that the background wall here is solid, so

that's going to be really easy for me to take this piece of equipment out

in Photoshop. I'm not going to do it in Lightroom and I'm not going to do

it right now. After we blend this photo together and we have it looking

the way we want it, then we'll make that final step to remove that tripod

out of there. This is a good example of a lot of blue

showing, we can see it on the floor here and coming in through the windows.

And you can really see it down in these thumbnails. So again just go down to

saturation and knock down the blue channel by quite a bit.