Understanding HDR, Flambient and Synergy Flash Photography

HDR, Flambient and Synergy Flash photography and editing techniques are all uniquely different. As a real estate agent you find that most all real estate photographers produce HDR images, and very few that produce Flambient photography.

This webpage is designed to help you understand the differences between these techniques by providing you with examples and a brief discussion of the pros and cons of each type. But more importantly, is to help you understand what is uniquely novel witht the Snap2Close Synergy Flash Photograhy.

HDR

Real Estate Photography has been dominated by a photography style called HDR (High Dynamic Range) for the last two decades This technique involves taking multiple photos of the same scene at different time based shutter exposures. The image below demonstrates this technique.

These images are then combined in software to create a single image with a wider dynamic range, meaning it can capture more detail in both the highlights and shadows. It is probably safe to say that 98% of the photos seen on MLS were captured via HDR.

The pros of this technique are that it captures a broader range of natural colors. Plus the image capture process is quick and the editing process more simplistic. This process also takes less time to photograph a home since there is no need to capture additional flash shots.

The negatives are achieving accurate colors and dealing with bouncing or reflecting color cast issues. While our Premium Editing technique deals with this issue, the addition of selected flash exposures remedies many of these problems.

Flambient Photography

This real estate photography technique requires the photographer to capture one image at the best ambient light level and then an additional shot pointing a strong flash signal at the ceiling. In this case the ceiling spreads the artificial light throughout the room. Typically this technique requires the photographer to take another shot with the flash pointed at the windows, which helps the editors to mask in the windows.

Flambient photography typically takes the photographer to take several flash shots with flash highlighting different areas.

The editing style for Flambient is much more complex and requires a great deal of Photoshop masking techniques. The editing required is much more time consuming and expensive than HDR editing.

The pros of Flambient Photography is that this technique captures accurate colors, crisper or sharper images and professional appeal. This technique is very popular with luxury listings. The negatives are really based upon the time required to capture most images. Each additional flash capture adds to the photographer’s time on site and to the editing process.

The shortcoming to the Flambient process is large rooms or rooms with many connecting or adjacent rooms. The image below probably best represents this issue.

While the photographer could have added 4 or 5 additional flash shots or captures, the time required to do so would have taken several minutes, and the editing time would have been substantially extended.

Synergy Flash Photography is designed for luxury homes.

Snap2Close believes that there is a better way of capturing the benefits of 5-bracket HDR images and Flash or Flambient photography and that is by combining the two techniques together. That is why we call it Synergy Flash Photography.

The definition of Synergy is “the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects”.

This technique utilizes a unique form of 5-bracketed time exposures, flash photography and a thoughtful hand crafting and blending the images together. The result produces a greater photograph than HDR and traditional flambient photography.

Fundamentally, this requires our editors to use a proprietary HDR blending technique to create an even light balance image, which is then hand blended with the RAW ambient image and the Flash image. This editing process requires a significant amount of time and requires two days to complete.

The examples below compare our HDR Premium editing in comparison to with our Synergy Flash editing.

 

While this webpage briefly touched on the editing styles, there are lots of articles on the Internet about HDR vs Flambient. However, since our unique Synergy Flash Photography is novel then you wont find any articles about it. However, in due time we believe that others will endeavor to copy our unique flash editing style so who knows what the future will reveal.

As a side note, we found this article on the Internet and found it to be well written and brief. We have no association with the company that published it, but it is a good read.

https://beatcolor.com/blog/photo-video-editting/flambient-vs-hdr-in-real-estate-photography/.

Synergy Flash techniques offer distinct advantages

• Consistent color accuracy
  
  
• Sharp detail retention
  
  
• Professional appearance
  
  
• Controlled shadows

Editing Cost

While the Synergy Flash Photography technique produces superior photos, the cost for this service is higher than our Standard and Premium HDR editing. Each Synergy Flash image is first edited as a 5-bracket Premium HDR image, then two additional image layers are added and then masked and layered into the final image. This additonal editing time is the basis of this price increase.