Re: Interior design Photography
All of the above, but very light on the HDR.
Your photo has several challenges, which, when overcome, will dramatically improve your finished product.
In no particular order:
1. Converging verticals. Learn what they are and control them.
2. Too much ceiling in the shot. A rule of thumb (if you are not using a tilt shift lens) is position the camera at about half the ceiling height (e.g. 4 ft.), or even a bit lower. Again, this is a rule of thumb and there many cases where you will want to break the rule.
3. Your choice of shooting through a (relatively dark room) toward an an outside view is perhaps the most challenging type of architectural shot. These shots frequently need to be compensated with a great deal of supplemental lighting. In this case, strobes would have been a good choice as they produce the same approximate color temperature as the outside daylight.
4. Don't shoot so wide. This is a common beginner mistake. The temptation is to capture as much of the room as possible. A better approach is to carefully compose the shot to tell a story. [I imagine myself sitting in one the chairs, enjoying the view on a pleasant Sunday afternoon...]
5. Color balancing. Notice how portions of the door frames and table top are cyan. A person in the scene would perceive them as being grey and brown(?). So in editing, you have to make adjustments to correct for these color casts. Likewise portions of the ceiling and walls are orange, green, magenta, cyan etc.
6. Portions of the chairs, ceiling beams, desk and the item on the fireplace mantel are in deep shadow. If you capture sufficient over exposures (bright frames) then you can blend in those areas for more detail, or you can use software such as Photomatix to blend the entire scene. Note however that Photomatix and other such software rarely produce good results by themselves. Additional editing in Photoshop is important.
7. The pool bar appears to be overexposed. Same advice as in #6, but reverse it.
8. I suspect that you shot this scene in two point perspective to utilize the ceiling beams as leading lines, or perhaps symmetry. I think I would have probably shot from left side of the frame looking toward the opposite corner of the room, and rearranged the seating area to work in the three point perspective composition.
9. Supplemental lighting on the interior would have helped bring out the color and vibrance of the flowers and the paintings. Simply ramping up saturation and vibrance in Photoshop is a less than optimal solution.
10. The glare on the painting on the left wall can be eliminated by shooting a separate frame while blocking the outside light from directly shining on the painting. Using a polarizing filter would another approach.
11. I see some barrel distortion, and perhaps other types of geometric distortion. Use PT Lens or equivalent to complete the task that your lens couldn't quite do.
12. Learn how to manually blend exposures in Photoshop (using masking) for best results.
I don't know if you shot five exposures at 1EV intervals, but I have personally had better results shooting as many exposures as it takes at 2EV intervals. For a scene like this, you would probably need from 5-7 exposures at 2 stops apart.
I hope this helps.
Alan
--
http://umbris.com
http://exhibitphotography.com