How best to balance exposure inside to outside
Howdy. Been a photographer for years. Now I'm getting going in VR.
The biggest obstacle I've encountered so far is balancing both color and exposure when shooting interiors with windows in the scene.
What are the preferred methods for overcoming this? Do you just not worry about it, and let the windows blow out and/or go blue?
Do you shoot two exposures, then combine them in photoshop? Even doing that only really compensates for the exposure, not for the difference in color temp between tungsten/daylight.
Do you shoot at night, dusk or on cloudy days to minimize the problem?
Seems like this is a biggie, as most people want to "see the view out the window" of a pano shot.
Any advice on tackling this issue much appreciated! Thanks!
--Tex
Re: How best to balance exposure inside to outside
Tex
You're having the problem all panorama & VR photographers have.
As we are producing images with a huge Field of View, most of use with lenses that have a huge FOV, the variation in lighting and light sources is much more of a problem than even photos taken with wide angle lenses.
I know a VR Photographer that has been doing a lot of virtual tours of apartment complexes and shoots at dusk so the light from the windows is closer to that in the apartment, but I've never considered that a viable solution.
A small part of the solution is additional lighting. I've used Smartpics' very short 18" floodlights to add light to a dark corner of a room. They are small enough to hide behind a couch or chair. I use a diffuser and just aim them at the ceiling to diffuse the light even more.
High Dynamic Range/Tone Mapping or Image Fusion is the nore reliable solution. This is a process of shooting multiple photos of the same scene at different shutter settings and compositing/blending them into one image so you can see into the shadows and out the windows.
I just put this Virtual Tour of a local restaurant on my website site and as you can see, there are views out the windows http://www.virtualalbuquerque.com/VirtualABQ/ScaloNorthern/
I've been using Photomatix Pro's HDR/Tone Mapping function for compositing my still photos and Enfuse Drolets to blend the circular fisheye source photos from my Nikon Coolpix 5400/FC-E9.
I just upgraded my Photomatix Pro from ver. 2.5 to 3.0 and may use their improved Exposure Blending instead of Enfuse Droplets as it now gets results similar to Enfuse with some fine tuning possible before producing the blensed images.(Photomatix's HDR/ToneMapping function has a problem with the "black background" of circular fisheye images globally including it in the compositing process where their Exposure Blending and Enfuse don't).
I hope that helps
Doug Aurand
Albuquerque, NM
Re: How best to balance exposure inside to outside
Tex
The solution to high contrast lighting (bright windows in normally lighted rooms) is High Dynamic Range Imaging usually combined with Tone Mapping.
I use a combination of software; Photomatix Pro for my still photography and Enfuse for my virtual photography. I'm usually compositing from 5 to 8 photos with different exposures
To deal with the problem of having incandescent and daylight in the same scene when shooting my vr source photos, I usually shoot for the more dominant light source, usually sunlight, and make some Color Balance changes to the stitched image in Photoshop to correct the look. I usually end up with a yellow "glow" from lamps on white walls that looks natural
When the dominant light is incandescent I set the camera for it, but as my shutter speeds increase with the room becoming darker, and the view out the windows showing up on the camera screne, I switch to the Sunlight setting so the view out the windows will look good.
Then I composite using Enfuse Droplets, usually the +2EV, +1, -0-, -1 (set for incandescent)and -5 photos (set for sunlight) gets good results but needs a little adjusting in Photoshop with Curves to brighten up the darker areas
Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM