what is wrong with this image

I've shot about 3-4 houses now and I use the same process for shooting and editing.
I use the HDR calculator but typically shoot about 5-9 shots for every room.

If I do this as a natural look in photomatix it is completely flat and washed out looking but no green coloring or the purple around the flowers
If I do the fusion/natural or interior it gets this color going
I even lowered blue and greens in LR by like -60 before this

still an issue.
Am I better off doing the default natural look on all photos and adding a little contrast and depth in PS afterwards?

areas of problem:

Under the couch, above the couch, around the flower.

Do you use pictures like this for publication?

I ask only because of the distortion. I cannot imagine seeing a picture this distorted in something like Architectural Digest.

Nick Aufiero wrote in post #18579095
I've shot about 3-4 houses now and I use the same process for shooting and editing.
I use the HDR calculator but typically shoot about 5-9 shots for every room.

If I do this as a natural look in photomatix it is completely flat and washed out looking but no green coloring or the purple around the flowers
If I do the fusion/natural or interior it gets this color going
I even lowered blue and greens in LR by like -60 before this

still an issue.
Am I better off doing the default natural look on all photos and adding a little contrast and depth in PS afterwards?

areas of problem:

Under the couch, above the couch, around the flower.

have you tried Enfuse or Enfuse GUI? also, in my experience, often times less is more ... 5 shots should be plenty.

outside of that, I see you have the overhead incandescent on but not the table top lamp. Seems pretty clear that the color temp transitions from outside light to the incandescent is where the trouble lies.

saea501 wrote in post #18579147
Do you use pictures like this for publication?

I ask only because of the distortion. I cannot imagine seeing a picture this distorted in something like Architectural Digest.

honestly, I wouldn't publish this kind of pic at all. I feel like I'm falling on my face.

Nick, get those verticals straight.

and don't worry about getting all 4 walls in the pic.

Needs to be lit IMHO.

1. Really bad distortion due to the sensor not being parallel to the verticals. (See Tom2017's post). If you don't have a tilt shift lens then use something like Lightroom's Transform tool to correct/minimise this.
2. You have red light being reflected from the sofa and the flowers onto the wall. The simple way to solve this is to remove the flowers/cover the sofa with black plastic in order to capture a neutral shot of the walls that can be masked in.

I would strongly suggest investing in a couple of AD200s, a couple of very compact Manfrotto lightstands, and an Xpro.

What this allows you to do for real estate or interior shots is to set up great sources of diffused lights at bounced angles, with small softboxes, whatever to light the room, and expose for the outside. It will save you hassles with multiple images being merged, then dealing with the HDR visual impacts, like what you see around the window trim, and some of the other artifacts you see here. I picked up all that equipment for my wife who is in real estate, and she has figured it out pretty quickly to my surprise, and liked the results. However she still needs to watch mirrors in the photos, which happen to catch the lighting equipment.

When taking shots at different exposures, with such brightly colored objects, you are going to be creating areas in the photo with strange color casts.

I won't comment about the technical value of the content, as that isn't the question being asked, and would be wildly off topic since the question wasn't "hey how great is this indoor shot for selling property"? It is "why do I get color casts and digital artifacts when taking many shots at different exposures and merging them to reduce the overall DR". I will leave that type of criticism to others.

This shows you where the highest concentrations of cyan, blue, green, magenta, and yellow are in your photo. This is what what you are fighting with outdoor ambient lighting coming in and hitting a bright couch and earth tones in the green spectrum. For me, the only way to combat that IMO is to use strategically placed small strobes like the AD200 to neutralize some of this, but being a small room, that might be tough here. HDR merge of many differently exposed frames are probably going to accentuate these pretty stark areas of color casting, otherwise. You can see the impacts of that couch (which is squarely in the red spectrum) in that room with sunlight or outdoor light hitting and scattering around the carpet and walls.

Also, it seems you have JPG compression set pretty high, ie the JPG level looks like it might be a 5 which isn't good. That is why there are large blocks of identical color instead of something more granular. Either AMASS/POTN did this (which I doubt, because Pekka was painstaking in his details for uploads), or the HDR and editing software caused this when saved to JPG. That isn't doing you an favors with the color casting either.

How did you create that image, TS?

Trying to think if it is practical, but it is certainly cool. Maybe useful creating gradients for color corrections.

It does a great job illustrating the need for having consistent lighting. The table lamp would have filled that lower right corner in a similar way as the upper left.

Alternatively, turning off the overhead incandescent would have done the trick too.

Agree that a blast from a speedlight would have helped too, but not always practical depending on budget/time.

I over accentuate image properties when trying to figure out issues. In this case, I ran several saturation steps once for each color "channel" that Photoshop allows for, minus the red because the couch is likely the culprit causing so much of the mixed colors in the room, and it didn't make sense to push that color up.

i am trying to get used to my new wacom, so ...

the difference in lighting is not caused by the couch. Any amount of color temp change from reflected light off of the couch would be super local. You can see a bit of that, but for the the vast majority of the room, it is completely irrelevant.

the difference is caused by the mixed lighting. This is most easily seen by the shadow cast by the lamp. With the light from the window being blocked by the lamp shade, there is a spot on the wall that is lit "only" by the overhead incandescent.

The floor below the window is also a good indicator here. Since it is so close to the window, the effect of the warm incandescent is canceled out.

The nope arrows just show that the window light is not going to bend and hit the walls to the left and right of the windows.

The color casts that were called out by the OP are from the couch though, underneath and behind it, which is what I am most specifically calling out. Definitely not the flowers and that section of wall.

Gotcha.

Sorry to beat a dead horse, but the wall going from orange in the upper left to blue down right, is just so distracting its hard for me to even see the fringing.

Assuming these are headed for MLS type resolution makes the minor details even less worrisome.

Though it wasn't my intention to get so far off track.

Yes, our MLS only allows something like a 960 or perhaps just over 1000px on the long end. That hides a bunch of errors/issues in photos. However I know many agents that also run their own sites, and offer up larger versions from the MLS listing. This is something I need to get set up for my wife, with smugmug or equivalent.

I REALLY hate to give this kind of feedback, but... The first thing is that the perspective is way off. Horizontal and vertical lines should be... horizontal and vertical. The other thing that I don't like is the use of HDR, especially in a shot like this because it is not necessary. You are getting flares around the window and the window panes and the corner shadows are too dark, IMHO. These are nearly unavoidable using HDR. My clients would never accept this from me. I really hate to give negative feedback, but I think that there is room for improvement, so prefer to consider this corrective criticism. For a room like this I would level the camera at about 3-3.5' and use a single flash mounted on the camera, but tilted back away from the room with the little white card popped up (it softens the light). I would set the camera to ISO 400-500, f/7.1 and 125-160th second shutter speed to get the outside properly exposed, and then add flash output to light the inside. I find that most realtors like their photos to be pretty bright (not overexposed). The shot shows good natural lighting and shadows, but it's a bit dark.

People have pointed out most of the issues, but the thing that immediately jumped out is that the image is just over-HDRed, to the point that the scene outside the window looks like a drawing - there needs to be a difference between inside or outside space or the entire image will just feel off.

I am sure the feedback has been accepted by now, I would hope, as this is about 5 months old now, and Nick hasn't been back on for 4 months. Nick only seems to show up when there is a business related issue, and not really photography related.