12 real estate photography editing tips to make your photos pop!

 Producing beautiful images of your properties is the first step to making them sell. With perfectly balanced images showing rooms in their most appealing light, your clients can picture themselves living there, day-to-day. Dull, flat images can form the first hurdle that many clients never make it past. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a pro photographer to take pro images – thanks to tools like Photoshop and Lightroom, average photos can come to life in the edit. Here are 8 editing tips to bring your real estate photography to life.

 

1- Colour correction real estate photography editing

As one of the quickest and easiest photo editing techniques, there’s no excuse for skipping colour correction. Both Photoshop, Lightroom and all good photo editors will allow you to bring your images to life through colour correction. Flat colours can be adjusted to give images a realistic yet dazzling look, and you can adjust hue and saturation to tweak colours in your real estate images until they look true to life.

2- Straighten the lines.

When you’re taking pictures of properties, you should start out by trying to get lines straight – squinty pictures can subtly undermine people’s faith in a property. However, if you’ve messed up and you’ve got a squint picture, you can straighten images in Photoshop later to create picture-perfect property photos. In Photoshop, the Free Transform tool will let you straighten out your shots, just select the whole image and drag the cursor to straighten your lines.

3- Balance the light.

“Getting the lighting right in your real estate images is crucial as potential buyers will be put off properties with bad light,” says Henry Escobar, a photography expert at Paper Fellows and Boomessays. “Yet shooting interiors, with artificial lighting and mirrors awkwardly reflecting light can create unpleasant dark spots as well as over-exposure. You can adjust all these levels in Lightroom by adjusting shadows and highlights, creating perfectly balanced photos.”

12 real estate photography editing tips

4- Clean your images up with cloning.

You can’t always declutter a room before you shoot it, especially if it’s still being lived in! Potential buyers need to see a blank canvas onto which they can project their lives and dreams, so decluttering rooms through Photoshop magic is a great skill to have. The clone tool in Photoshop can paint over objects, cleaning up your images in seconds.

5- Crisp up your pictures.

Adjusting the clarity of your images can sharpen them up, bringing out-of-focus images into professional sharpness. In Lightroom, this is as simple as taking the clarity bar and bringing it up by dragging the cursor to the right. However, don’t go too far or you’ll create an artificial sharpness that damages your image resolution.

12 real estate photography editing tips

6- Mastering HDR real estate photography editing.

HDR (high dynamic range) is a popular effect among photographers as it can inject a richness of colour into your images that bring them to life. Many cameras have HDR mode nowadays but if not, shoot several images of the same subject with a different focus and merge them together to balance shadows and highlights.

7- Using image processor.

The image processor allows you to resize your photos in batches. This is a time-saving tool, especially if you are working on hundreds of images that will have to be used in different mediums. To use the image processor tool, select File menu and click on Image Processor. Choose Folder in the dialog box and save in the same location. Choose JPEG as file type and click on Resize to fit and put in your desired dimensions. Make sure that you include the ICC profile and click Run.

8-  Do composites.

Composite is an ingenious technique that merges different photos to create a seamless image. This can be used in real estate when you’re blending together different images, such as stitching flash and ambient shots into a single photo. This is often done on instances wherein the subject is manually lit by the photographer using a handheld flash.

9- Batch edit, if possible.

If you’re working on similar edits on a number of photos, it’s best to batch edit them using Lightroom. This allows you to save time and do the minor edits all in one go. Just do the retouches and adjustments on one photo and sync these changes into the rest of the images.

10- Sky replacement.

“When shooting exterior shots of your properties, it helps to pick a sunny day, as warm light and a blue sky bring out the best in any property,” says Lewis Perez, a writer at Lia Help and OXEssays. “But when the weather doesn’t play ball, you can turn to Photoshop.” Bring up the shadows and add a splash of colour to your skies, to give your viewers an injection of blue-sky thinking!

11- Image processor.

These days, clients want to see properties from every angle before they commit to a viewing as we have higher digital expectations. This means real estate developers are taking more images than ever, often ending up with packed hard drives and lengthy uploads. Photoshop can take the sting out of your image processing by automating exports of photos into batches, allowing you to resize, and modify file type, in multiple images at once. This is a huge time-saver that lets you focus on the client.

12- Playing with hue and saturation.

Hue and Saturation is another helpful tool in Photoshop. This can be used for color correction and is also similar to Curves. However, Hue and Saturation can be used to enhance the greens on exterior and landscape photos. To use Hue and Saturation, go to Image menu, choose Adjustments, and click on Hue and Saturation. Choose Yellow from the dialog box. Increase the hue and decrease the saturation and lightness. Change the option from Yellow to Green and repeat the changes you’ve made to hue, saturation, and lightness. Then, click OK.

Moving on

Selling property is all about presenting a beautiful vision to your clients, somewhere they can imagine themselves living and dreaming. Images are crucial to the projection of this vision, and Photoshop, Lightroom and other free photo editing tools are now packed with features that can bring your images to life. Play around in Photoshop and you’ll be amazed at what you can create!

Photoshop service contact information at Editretouching.

If customers need to choose photo editing services or custom design services on demand at Edittouching, please quickly contact the information:

Experts will quickly receive information and support specific advice for customers. Editretouching in the spirit of working with high responsibility, receiving photo editing as required to solve problems in business strategy, or personally bring high efficiency to customers.