Interior Testing
It’s Monday, and for some bizarre reason I have an entire week devoid of jobs. That hasn’t happened at this time of year since I started shooting property. Although worrying, it gives me some time to sort out all manner of business from laying awake worrying about the twelve thousand quid of outgoings i’ve got to look forward to in the next six weeks, to testing this new Hasselblad kit in all sorts of conditions. Tomorrow, my car goes in for it’s final MOT and service so I’m going to have a day shooting the camera in and around the Amble area, but today it’s time for a bit of basic interiors testing.
As usual, it’s my unprepared living room that takes the hit. It’s a room with a bit of natural light, muted colours, and various bits of tat lying around. The exercise involves shooting the space with my Nikon D850 and a 24mm lens, then the Hasselblad X1Dii and the 28mm HCD lens (about 24mm in full frame format). I’ll shoot two identical frames on a tripod - the first using only natural light at 0.5s shutter speed, f8 aperture, at iso 100, then the second at 1/40ths at f8 and a godox AD200 Pro flash pointing upwards at the ceiling behind the camera. All raw files at maximum resolution.
The Nikon raw files will be processed using my everyday workflow - into Adobe Lightroom, then stacked as layers in Photoshop and the ambient frame blended with the flash frame.
The Hasselblad raws will be treated the same way through the Adobe software, but then separately processed through Phocus software and exported as layers into Photoshop. This will give me three images using the camera’s default colour balance which can be compared side to side.
First, the Nikon result:
I would generally process the final Nikon image some more - adding contrast and some clarity to the final output. This almost looks HDR in nature, and the colour temp is a bit warm, although some clients like that.
The Hasselblad files through Lightroom next:
Not bad. The colours are a lot cooler, and there seems to be a bit of a magenta tint, although this could easily be sorted in Lightroom before the export process. These files have been reduced hugely from the original 50 megapixel monster, but it still looks sharper than the Nikon file.
Finally, the Hasselblad files put through the proprietary Phocus software:
Darker, maybe punchier, with absolute realistic colour and tone rendition. The raw files could have been pushed and pulled to lift shadow areas, but I left it as it was shot straight out of the camera. This is my favourite of the three, and could be manipulated to give all sorts of different final results. I even feel that I could have managed with a single exposure using natural light and Phocus software to recover highlights and shadows.
So - an interesting, but non-conclusive test. It shows that everything is subjective, and both cameras are capable of great results if the light and technique is sound. As mentioned previously, I’m probably not going to shoot everyday real-estate with the X1D, but it has the potential to lift certain jobs to portfolio standard as things go on.
