Post-production | Architectural Photography Almanac

Photographing Homes While California is Choked in Wildfire Smoke

Mike KelleyOctober 11, 2020 4

For those of us living in California and the rest of the West Coast of the US, it’s been a crazy few months to say the least. Wildfire smoke has engulfed nearly every part of the region at some point over the past two months, turning skies grey and orange from Los Angeles to Seattle.

Many architectural photographers have continued to work through the fires and the resulting smoke – myself included – to great frustration and annoyance.

AI-Powered Sky Replacement Tool Coming to Adobe Photoshop

Brandon VogtsSeptember 22, 2020September 22, 2020 4

Sky replacements have long been standard practice in architectural photography. However, the existing tools to do so remain, in my opinion, somewhat haphazard. Some skies are an easy slam-dunk, capable of being replaced in a few clicks using something as simple as the Tragic Wand or Quick Selection tool.

Color Management in Architectural Photography

Brandon VogtsJuly 27, 2020July 27, 2020 10

Architectural photographers routinely work in environments with multiple competing (and sometimes unusual) light sources. We are then expected to produce final images that accurately and artistically depict the captured spaces. From there, we carefully export files that need to show well on a variety of electronic devices, as well as print destinations ranging from wide-gamut gicleé prints to magazines printed with an offset press. Our clients generally don’t understand much about what goes on behind the scenes during this complicated process—they just want everything to work.

Get to Know Adobe’s Newest Features: Localized Hue Editing and ISO Adaptive Presets

Dane AlonsoJune 29, 2020June 25, 2020 0

Adobe has just updated its “photography plan” applications, Lightroom and Camera Raw with some great new features. Aside from the usual performance improvements, Adobe has (finally!) changed the user interface found on Adobe Camera Raw, integrating it seamlessly with Lightroom. Additionally, they have rolled out a couple of brand new features: ISO Adaptive Presets and Localized Hue Editing.

How to Straighten Your Images in Photoshop and Lightroom

Usman DawoodJune 1, 2020June 1, 2020 1

One of the cardinal rules for architectural photography is that vertical lines must remain vertical. It’s considered bad form in many instances to photograph a building and have it look like it’s falling backwards, or heavily distorted. Unfortunately, there may be times when it just isn’t possible to achieve this in camera and some post production is required.

The House That Architectural Photography Built: Shooting My Own Home During Coronavirus Quarantine

György PalkóApril 8, 2020April 8, 2020 7

Architectural photography started for me as a hobby, but from the very beginning of the ‘photographing my hometowns cityscape‘ stage, I called my photography Facebook page György Palkó Architectural Photographer. That name led me to my first contract. Five years and many many jobs and clients later we moved into our new home last year.

A Simple Fix That Will Help You Switch From Lightroom to Capture One

Usman DawoodMarch 3, 2020 28

For the first few years of my career as an architectural photographer, I swore by Adobe Lightroom. In my experience, Lightroom has been incredibly useful for going through a large batch of images, but it doesn’t quite keep up with Capture One’s refined controls, so I started looking at Capture One as an alternative.

Lightroom Just Received a Huge Workflow Update: Are You Switching Back?

Usman DawoodFebruary 13, 2020 14

Adobe has recently updated Lightroom and some of the new features are pretty useful.

As architectural photographers, I’m sure most of us are pretty familiar with having huge numbers of layers in Photoshop. Light painting and compositing can cost a lot of storage and many of us have become accustomed to using PSB files, especially with the advent of higher-megapixel cameras where only a few layers will put you over the size limit.

Post-production From Start To Finish: Step 1 – File Organization and Importing

György PalkóJanuary 21, 2020 12

A new year gives us all an opportunity to rethink our processes and see if we are doing the tedious back end parts of our jobs in the most efficient way. In 2018, I started a new — and more organized — system of organizing my files, and so far it has been working out really well for me. Data storage and file handling is usually incredibly personal and changes from person to person, so just remember, there is not one single right way to do it.

Lightroom’s HDR Merge in Depth

György PalkóJanuary 13, 2020January 12, 2020 9

In my previous article, I admitted to both using Lightroom’s HDR function and showing that it’s a viable solution for professional architectural photography. There are many benefits to post processing with this technique, because what you end up with is still a RAW file, you can play with white balance, shadows and highlights exactly like on a single capture, but with the extended dynamic range offered by a blended HDR file.