First of all, I must say that even thought I love photography, my skills are pretty bare. I've learnt to use lightroom auto toning feature and healing brush as well as managed a few layer merge from focus stacking test that were not that bad.
My current issue is, I tried tacking a stack of 5 exposition in some rooms for my brother who's planning to put his house for sale and trying to use the Photoshop HDR merge, the result I get is grayish picture with less than vivid colors.
I read another post about this and people suggested going with layers mask and hand painting it but since I've never done this, trying to layer mask 5 exposition with many zone not at the right exposition isn't something I'm able to get do with a good result. I've also tried the suggestion of going with luminosity mask but the results are once again gray and muddy looking.
I'll link the ARW on a dropbox if someone feels like giving a look to see if the issue is with my pictures but I honestly think it comes from my lack of knowledge on how to work to produce HDR.
This was my first try at HDR stacking, so I meant to ask you if there is automated way to get decent result with my pictures? Would I need to take the pictures again with different exposition setting than what I used? I don't mind either working multiple hours of the first picture to learn, if I can expect to speed up the process afterward, I just can't justify working 5hr+ per image ;)
For the info, I've used a 5 picture shot going from -3, -1.33, 0, 1.33, 3 exposure setting on a Sony A7RIII with a 16-35 2.8GM lens. Shot with both JPG and ARW format.
Thank you for any guidance!
Onedrive link to ARW: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvCd0qqvfLdwg65diGtDSSPt3bEAWg?e=64tjAR
Merge to HDR pro result, giving a weird feeling like if there was a film in front of it/grayish.