In a previous post, I discussed being creative with your photos, and showed you how to make a black and white photo with a little color added. Today, I want to show you how to do windows. Not how to clean them or how to run the operating system by the same name, but how to take photos of interiors of homes.
Many times, you will be taking photos of an interior of a home or business, and it will be sunny outside. There will be light streaming in through the windows, and the interior will be darker. Digital cameras cannot cover the same range of lighting that film can, so you have a problem. If you expose for the interior, the window will be overexposed, and if you expose the shot for the window light, the interior will be too dark.
The solution is to either close the window shades, losing the view of the outside through the window, or to expose for the interior lighting and manipulate the image later. You can have both the interior and the window view exposed properly by doing some image manipulation in your favorite photo editing software. Here is how to “fix” a window, step by step:
1. Take a picture of an interior of a home or business, including a window, on a sunny day, at a time between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. (we usually try to avoid these times for photography, because of the poor lighting conditions).
2. Get up close to the window, right against the glass, and take a picture of the outside (what you see through the window).
3. Adjust the first image so that the interior is exposed properly. Normally, adjusting auto levels in Photoshop or similar programs will do the trick. The second shot probably doesn’t need any adjustment.
4. Open the picture of the outside view. Open the picture of the interior. Drag the picture of the interior onto the picture of the exterior view. Click on the layers panel and set the opacity of the interior shot to 50%.
5. Slide the interior shot over the background image (exterior shot) until they are lined up the way you want them.
6. Set the opacity back to 100% and start erasing the window area. This will reveal the background image in the window.
7. Continue until all the window area has been erased, and you can clearly see the background.
8. You may want to then darken the areas around the window by using the burning tool. This will bring the overexposed area around the window into better focus.
9. Save your new image.
Finished image:
This was a tricky one, due to the curtain and the stuff in front of the window, but most windows are not that bad(?)