We’ve got something great in store just before the end of this year. We started 2024 with the introduction of V4.0, which laid the groundwork for all the great updates we released this year. We now introduce V4.6, packed with improvements to make your real estate photography workflow better and more reliable. This version focuses on improving dynamic range, better details and perspective correction, helping photographers and real estate professionals achieve consistent, high-quality results more efficiently.
HDR Harmoniser: Better Dynamic Range
High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is widely used in real estate photography. It involves combining multiple exposures - a middle exposure, one darker, and one brighter - to balance the bright and dark areas of a photo. While this often works well, it can struggle when all the exposures are too bright or too dark, making it hard to achieve the best results.
Our new HDR Harmoniser solves this problem. By studying how professional editors enhance bracketed images, we developed a system that analyzes and improves brackets before they are being merged with Autoenhance.ai's unique blending algorithm. HDR Harmoniser identifies whether extra “virtual” exposures are needed and creates them if necessary. This ensures that even challenging sets of brackets result in a well-balanced final photo.
The HDR Harmoniser even works on single-exposure images. It generates multiple virtual exposures from a single photo, simulating the effect of HDR without adding extra noise or overexposed areas. The result is a balanced, natural-looking image with all the important details preserved.
Example Image of HDR Harmoniser
Below, you can see an example of a three-bracket HDR set that is too dark. The AI system creates brighter virtual exposures and only selects the best brackets for blending, delivering an improved final image.
Without HDR Harmoniser:
With HDR Harmoniser:
This comparison shows the enhanced shadows, highlights, and overall dynamic range achieved with V4.6. By analyzing and optimizing every uploaded bracket, HDR Harmoniser makes it easier to get professional-quality results.
Better Colors and More Vibrant Images
We’ve updated our AI pipeline to make your images sharper, brighter, and more colour-accurate. The latest improvements include reduced halos and better colour retention. These enhancements were made possible by retraining our AI on a larger dataset, enabling it to deliver even more consistent and accurate colours for your images.
Improved White Balance
In our previous version 4.5, we introduced significant improvements to our white balance pipeline, which made handling challenging scenarios much more consistent. With V4.6, we are building on this foundation using a larger dataset to refine the system further. These updates allow for even better performance in mixed-illuminant scenes and cases where the original white balance is extremely off.
Better Perspective Corrections with Less Cropping
Our perspective correction AI has been improved to work better for both indoor and outdoor photos. We listened to your feedback about the level of perspective correction for exterior shots. In V4.6, we’ve strengthened our corrections for external scenes, ensuring vertical lines align perfectly. This provides a more professional look to exterior images, while still maintaining reduced cropping for better image retention.
Original Exterior Image:
Corrected Perspective with V4.6:
Metadata-Based Lens Corrections
We’ve introduced lens corrections based on camera metadata. Some cameras, like many Sony models, provide lens information in its metadata, which Autoenhance.ai can now use for more accurate corrections. This reduces distortions and ensures your images look as natural as possible.
Changes to Auto Privacy
To improve performance, we’ve temporarily disabled auto privacy for photo frames containing people and for-sale signs. These features will return in a future update with much better accuracy. Auto privacy for license plates and human faces remains active.
As the year comes to a close, we’re excited to share V4.6 to help you create professional real estate images in minutes.
Autoenhance App Users: Simply upload your images to the Autoenhance app and select V4. This will automatically trigger V4.6 in the background.
API Users: Set ai_version to 4.6 and try the latest update. To always use the latest version of Autoenhance.ai, set ai_version to 4.x. Refer to our API documentation for more information.
We’re excited about what’s to come and have much more planned for next year. Stay tuned!
