I got another call to do a Commercial Real Estate shoot. This was for a local motel. They wanted a variety of shots of the exterior and interiors of their three different room configurations. They wanted the exterior shot during the day and after sundown to show the lights. Here is after sundown.
This was not a simple picture. I started out intending to do an HDR, but the processing seemed to add noise to it. So, I used the normally exposed frame. I adjusted exposure and black level, added contract, and sharpened as I would normally do, but there were distractions. They were in the process of installing something in the grass between this place and the one next door. There was an orange net fence. So, I cloned that out. There was a street sign that was distracting. So, that got cloned out as well. Then there was the street in front of the place. It was a large grey region in the foreground. So, I burned it in to darken it and then blurred it to reduce any definition.
This was the view of the double room configuration. The interior shots, too needed a great deal of help. First of all, there were no drapes in these rooms. The only thing to control the ambient light was mini blinds. I used my two LCD video lights and set those up in the corners behind me. Even at that, the exposure was dark. So, I corrected exposure and black level, added contrast, and vibrancy and sharpened the image. It still had some shadow problems, so, I moved the shadow slider up as far as it would go, and that really opened up the shadows. The final thing was the perspective. Every frame of this shoot was taken with a 10 – 20 lens, and there were serious perspective distortions as a result of the lens. So, I took the images into photoshop and transformed them to remove the distorted perspective. Now, all the lines are straight, and the end result was a usable image.
