In this post, we will talk about the amazing techniques that you can use to help clients sell their property better by optimizing the look and feel of your real estate images.
There’s no doubt that higher-quality photos make a difference in real-estate. In the early days of Airbnb, the founders traveled to New York to take professional photos of their NYC listings. It immediately doubled their weekly revenue. Combine great photography with a great real-estate CRM to keep track of your clients, and you too will see your business grow.
Photographers use different techniques to retouch and make properties look better in their photos. Here are some of the most commonly used editing techniques for real estate photography.
What is Real Estate Photo Editing?
Real estate photo editing greatly enhances the quality of photographs of properties turning them visually appealing as well as attractive to potential buyers. It showcases properties in their best light, highlighting their architecture, landscaping, and interior design to name a few things.
The goal is to use different techniques and tools to adjust brightness and contrast, killing distractions and cropping the image.
Real estate photo editing benefits both businesses and individuals. Here are the stakeholders who require the service. Editing real estate photos is essential for both agencies and individual sellers looking to enhance property listings. It underscores the importance of effective web design for real estate in maximizing visual appeal and marketing impact.
However taking real estate photos correctly means you can do away with lot of the heavy editing later on.
How to Take Real Estate Photos Correctly?
1. Use a Tripod
With a tripod, you can take photos at low shutter speeds. A tripod also stabilizes the camera and in that manner prevents a blurry image, so you get images that are sharp, crisp, and ready to use. When you use a tripod, you can link up professional flash accessories and bring out the original colors of the home décor and structural surfaces in and around the property/house.
2. Use a Camera with Brackets Shooting Feature
This is another top real estate photography tip. To get the correct results, start with the correct exposure. To do this properly, you need exposure bracketing where you take a series of identical photos all at the same aperture but differing shutter speeds. A fixed aperture keeps the depth of field uniform. Changing the exposure lets you capture well-exposed photos for different lighting levels.
3. Use Wide-Angle Lens
A good photo captures and presents viewers with most of the room. This is possible with a wide-angle lens. This is doable even with space and light limitations. A wide-angle lens comes with a smaller focal length as compared to a standard lens. This gives more area of the subject room in the shot. Wide-angle lenses of these lengths are great for real estate photography.
4. Use a Tilt-Shift Lens
A normal lens capture gets a regular circular image. This is because the image is projected to a sensor and the normal lens is fixed to the position of the camera sensor.
In a tilt-shift lens, we can change this image position. As and when you tilt and lean, the center of the imagined circle changes which straightens the lines that converge in the distance.
The position where the camera is placed is generally constant. But the tilt-shift works to alter the lens perspective as well. This feature gives a great advantage to real estate photographers. Straight walls may look a bit crooked because of the perspective a normal lens offers. But, you can successfully change that perspective with tilt shift lens.
5. Use a Drone for Aerial Shots
Aerial photos allow buyers to get a bird’s eye view of the property and understand its dimensions better.
Most drones come with an image bracketing ability that’s useful for real estate photographers. The foldable drone supports raw image format. If you use high dynamic range your drone photos will match interior shots correctly.
6. Use a 360 Camera for Virtual Tours
A 360 virtual tour gives potential buyers a bigger more feature-rich picture of the horse. A 360-degree tour gained popularity in the run-up to the pandemic and is now a rage because people keep skipping the house in person.
It adds real-world magic. Digital images are combined to create an interactive and real experience of your home. It’s a great way to present your home for sale.
7. Shoot at Low ISO (100 to 400 Max)
ISO is nothing but a measure of the camera’s sensitivity to light. The ISO international standardization organization is used to brighten or darken the images. So ISO setting indicates a camera’s sensitivity to light. Some standard ISO values are 100, 200, 400, and 800.
Image noise or graininess is a problem faced by even professionals. It can result more so often in pictures you take from high-set ISO settings. These grains or dots of color can wreak perfect images. Noise at times seems unavoidable. But you can tackle this in different ways. Set the photographs at low ISO. The base ISO setting is 100. Unless you’re clicking in low-light conditions, leave the settings at the base value.
How to Edit Your Real-Estate Photos?
We’ve got some fantastic tips to share that will help you achieve stunning real-estate photos.
1. Brightness and Color Correction
Brightness and color correction are the bedrock of image enhancement. You can do color correction on Colorcinch.
At first, it may seem fairly simple to change the color, contrast, tone, and sharpness of an image. However, these simple edits that take a few movements of the mouse transform a bland and boring image into one that looks bright and appealing to potential home seekers.
These retouches are enough to turn average photos into killer captivating photos that capture the buyer’s attention and egg them closer to a purchase. Correcting further, you may need to work on saturation, hue, tint, and get a better image. In addition to further beautify your photo, you can use procreate pixel art brushes.
2. Use the Perfect Exposure Level
The exposure level you set for the photos is critical to image editing. Brightly lit images draw people’s attention and this is proven with studies where people were asked to choose from two images. In these studies, the control group always picks one with a brighter color. So the perfect exposure levels can make a huge difference. When the photos are dark the viewer may not notice all features. So, increase exposure and take good care of contrast.
3. Image Cropping and Resizing
Image cropping and resizing are clearly the simpler features, but it is also essential. You should always use the magic of resizing your photos to adjust for clarity.
When shooting real estate, you need to be extra careful with your lines. You need to make sure that the horizontal lines and perspectives are aligned.
When you do photoshoots for properties, be careful with lines. They should be straight and never appear bent. Why?
Because straight vertical and horizontal lines that don’t converge are often always an issue in real estate photography. Factors like lens curvature, the room’s shape, and even how a camera is positioned can distort straight lines. You can fix this issue in post-production with retouches known as perspective correction.
Editing a photo this way ensures that these lines align with the image’s frame. This makes the photo look natural.
4. Even out the Light
A big problem when shooting interiors or exteriors is you get very little control over the lighting. Fortunately, Colorcinch helps you fix shadows, whites or blacks, and highlights. Drag the shadows bar to the right and open it up a bit for you to find a safe middle ground. If you have harsher lights on the photo use the sharpen or the clarity option to fix things.
Get your images enhanced as the images from the shoot aren’t always great.
Enhancing the images makes them even more stunning. This tool helps you achieve the desired image for your listings and ads. You need to tweak the image’s brightness, contrast, sharpness, and white balance for this.
5. Use HDR
High dynamic range (HDR) is a technique that many real estate photographers use to create a greater dynamic range of luminosity. To create HDR images, make sure you shoot your subject in different bracketed images. Then, all you have to do is merge the photos into one to show its highlights and shadows. An image taken outdoors with the sun can appear underexposed or overexposed. You can fix that with HDR or High Dynamic Range Blending. The mid-tones, lights, etc look perfect.
6. Remove Unwanted Objects
At times, taking a picture of a property gives you plenty of unwanted objects in the background that you may want to remove. Such a clean-up is easy to do. Many commonly seen situations like this need a bit of cleaning up.
- A car in the driveway that blocks the view of the garden
- The TV cords show and make the image cluttered
- The granite counter would be great if not for the frying pan in the corner
- A crack in the bathtub and the wallpaper coming off in the kitchen
7. Remove Color Cast
Color cast in a photo is problematic. This spoils photos especially as you want to make them look eye-catching.
Color cast can be thought of as a tint of specific colors in a photograph that’s often unwanted and distracting to say the least.
Certain lighting can cause both film and digital cameras to render some types of color cast.
- Here are situations that cause the color cast to appear:
- Certain fluorescent bulbs produce bluish tinge
- Dark window tint films alter the colors of beige walls
- Gray skies may dull otherwise bright walls
- Color settings of the camera can affect natural home colors.
Editing can help you put back the original colors in these places in two simple ways. These techniques neutralize and remove unwanted tint that may make real colors.
8. Remove the Sky to Enhance the Image
Colors can come alive on bright days. Gloomy wintery days can make your photography look dull. You can replace the sky with some editing tricks and make the sky look better. This instantly enhances your images.
Replacing the sky can:
- Turn the property into a more attractive property
- Clear skies act as an instant mood booster
- Provide real estate photographers with a worry-free life and not have to rely on the weather for the shoot.
So a few tricks help you replace cloudy skies with sunny ones. This alone changes the mood in a good way.
9. Add Elements
There are few things more welcoming than a green lawn outside a home.
But during the wrong season, a lawn mostly consists of dead patches.
To learn how to create a good lawn you can check tutorials online.
- You can add fire to the fireplace
- You can add a pool and patio outside the property
- Add modern furniture to the balcony
- Add anything else to enhance and add value to the photos.
Editing your photo shows the property in full glory convincing the viewer that this is an ideal investment.
These minor details make the image both lively and realistic. This is done to add some elements to the room. Small images like the presence of a TV in the room or placing a few indoor plants or maybe a lit fire in the chimney give life to an empty room and remove its clinical appearance. This makes it more appealing to the average buyer.
10. Keep Your Images Realistic
The final but most important tip for editing your real estate photos is to keep them natural-looking.
Don’t go overboard and resist making them look overly saturated and cartoonish. To make your photos appear realistic, you need to ensure a more natural look that’s still appealing.
Conclusion
These are some of the ways to keep your images realistic when shooting real estate. Editing your images enhances their quality and helps you get more buyers. Let us know what you think?