Rangefinder Magazine
September 2001/Features

Room with a View by Michael Campbell
Using Photoshop to Photograph a Room Interior

I recently purchased a Tamron 14mm lens to use with my Fuji S1 digital camera (it equates to about a 21mm lens on a 35mm film SLR). To test it, I photographed my living room in California.

Figure 1	Figure 2

The main problem shooting interiors with windows revealing sunlit scenes is the range of exposure—it is too great for either film or digital cameras. If you expose for the interior (Fig 1), the window is burned out. If you expose for the exterior (Fig 2), you have no detail inside the room.

The famous British painter of moonlit street scenes, Atkinson Grimshaw, said in a lecture to a group of photographers in England in 1890, “Nature possesses the full range of light and photographers must be content with an octave or two in the middle of the manual and cannot attempt to grasp the full length of the keyboard.”

Architectural photographers can spend many hours lighting the interior of a building to match the brightness of the outside.

Michael Campbell used the inside/outside technique in the Chapter House of the 13th Century Abbey that was the home of William Henry Fox Talbot the inventor of Photography. Here he combined exposures of 1ž250 of a second for the outside view with exposures as long as 2 seconds for the dark inside scene. In Photoshop he masked the window areas and superimposed the two layers.

Another approach, which does not require additional light, is a method I devised years ago when shooting some shots for Unique Homes magazine. I covered the outside of the window in the shot with black material; made an exposure of the inside, then after removing the material, double exposed the same piece of film with a much shorter exposure to record just the window scene. It worked well for small windows on the ground floor but was not possible for larger windows or upstairs.

I did not want to spend hours lighting the interior to match the exterior exposure and I certainly didn’t want to cover the windows with black material. Instead, I achieved a satisfactory result very quickly and easily by taking a series of exposures with the camera on the tripod. These exposures ranged from 1ž250 at f/16 to 1ž4 second at f/16 for the interior. I loaded the images into Photoshop and placed each one on a separate layer in the same file (by dragging each one in while holding down the shift key, they were all perfectly registered).

I made a mask layer for each layer and proceeded with the brightest exposure at the top of the layers palette, to mask out the burned-out windows and exterior portion. (Note: to make a mask layer, for each layer click on the new mask icon at the bottom of the layers palette. To mask out areas, I used the airbrush tool set on 50%. I painted into the mask area in the window area of the scene, starting from the top with the lightest exposure, which revealed the layer underneath.)

Figure 3	Figure 4

I repeated this masking procedure, working my way down through the progressively darker layers until I had revealed all the detail I wanted in various areas of the image. I then flattened the image (Fig. 3). As always in Photoshop, this way is not the only way to skin the cat. I personally prefer the use of the airbrush to build up and remove masks (switching from black to white paint or changing the percentage). Others may prefer a more mechanical method.
While I was working on this I remembered that the first photograph ever taken, in 1835, (Fig. 4) was made of a similar scene by the inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot at his 700-year-old home in Lacock Abbey in England. I decided to pop over there and apply the same technique to his famous Oriel Window.

Again, I used the 14mm Tamron lens and made an exposure for the exterior scene at 1ž250 at f/16, (Fig 5). I then made a second exposure of the interior at 1ž15 second at f/16 (Fig 6). With Photoshop masks I again removed the burned out portion of the lighter exposure to reveal the darker layer below. The final result is Figure 7. The masked version is shown in Figure 7a.

Figure 5	Figure 6	Figure 7	Figure 7a

I then went down stairs to the “warming room,” where the nuns used to prepare their meals. The warming room at Lacock was the only place the nuns were allowed to have fire back in the 13th century. The famous iron cauldron was used recently for filming part of the new Harry Potter movie. I produced the final image (Figures 8a–c) combining the exposures for the interior and for the sunlit area on the floor using the same method as I had before. A Nikon 20mm lens was used with the Fuji S1 camera.

Figure 8a	Figure 8b	Figure 8c

This technique can be applied wherever the range of brightness is too great to capture it with a single exposure and where the subject is stationary and you can use a tripod to take a variety of exposures from exactly the same position. All image manipulation was achieved using a MacIntosh G-3 and Adobe Photoshop 6.0.

Michael Campbell, whose web site is, www. michaelcampbell.com is a photographer and teacher who lives in San Diego. Readers can contact him by email at mccphoto.san.rr.com