Editing Real Estate Photos For Virtual Tour
April 24th, 2007 Connecticut, Family Life, Geekage and Blogging, Staging and Clutter
Shooting anything with a window during the day is usually a recipe for photographic disaster. The light from the window and the shadows in the room typically turn the photo into a picture of a darkened pit with the nuclear bomb flash outside the window.
I have a good camera, so some of the downside are minimized already. The editing has been to simply decrease the light balance in the highlights and increase the light balance in the shadowed areas. I might have dialed up the color slightly and I also corrected the slight camera rotation. Despite all that, it’s still an uphill battle to make it look good.
Better is to stand with your back to the window in the first place.
The colors are far closer to real life and you can see I corrected quite a bad camera rotation… er maybe a little much actually. The downside is that you do get to less of the room. The first photo shows more of the room.
Trying another angle. Getting more of the room in. The editing brightened the room and sharpened the image up a little. Magically I held the camera level this time.
Any one of the photos is reasonable and would make the cut as 1 of the 10 allowed photos on the CTMLS. The beauty of a Virtual Tour is that you can splurge on photos and toss in as many as you like. If a room is really good and has some size, a single photo isn’t enough to do it justice.
This photo for example would never make the 10 MLS photo cut, but it has a place in a Virtual Tour as an accent piece.
The tour these photos appear in is Here.
April 24th, 2007 at 7:56 pm
After my crack about you and Photoshop - nice job! You’d be amazed how many people have no idea where to start. Well, okay, you wouldn’t be (after all, you are posting the Bad MLS Photo of the Day), but all the same, I reckon this is a pretty useful little post. Both pretty and useful. Not that my opinion has any great impact on your success.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Thanks Tim, though really I can’t claim any superb photo skills. It’s just walking into a camera shop and saying “I’m a realtor and need to take decent real estate photos” as a starting point.
Then fiddle with an editing program until you have some variety of compentence.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:25 am
I think you should maybe do a virtual tour demo with some MLS photos of the day.
Don’t put it where a client would see it, however…
April 25th, 2007 at 10:57 am
I’d thought of that too. Norm Fisher did something like that a couple months back that was a hit.
My software would automatically nestle my bad photo tour in with my good ones. I’d just have to lead with text saying “Bad Photo Tour” I guess. Maybe in a month or so.
August 18th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
I have been approached by a real estate agent to do some virtual photos of there properties, do you have any suggestions. I am a local photographer and have all the basic equipment, I just need some technical tips.
Sincerely Anthony
August 19th, 2007 at 9:10 am
As much as possible try and make the tour flow from room to room logically. So the kitchen from a couple angles, then the living room, then the dining room, rather than all mixed up.
Shoot anything that has interesting detail in the room for accent shots in the virtual tour. A close up of moldings, fancy door handles, flowers in the garden etc to break up visual look as much as possible.