Photography For Real Estate

Of all the great features and improvements that the new Lightroom 3, released by Adobe today has, the most significant feature, by far for real estate photographers is the manual lens correction sliders!

For many other photographers this feature is  a yawner. But real estate photographers shoot in a right-angle, level world where verticals need to be vertical and straight. Before today Lightroom users had to do a round trip to PTlens, Photoshop just to straighten up a vertical that looked a little wonky.

Now, with the 5 transform sliders in the manual section of Lens Corrections you can quickly fix all the typical problems with verticals right in Lightroom. Distortion will take out barrel distortion, Vertical, Horizontal and Rotate will fix issues caused by not having your camera perfectly level and Scale re-scales the photo if needed after you’ve made the other adjustments. Cutting out round-trips to other applications just to make these corrections is a huge time saver!

As I discussed in a previous post, if your lens has a profile, either supplied by Adobe or one you or someone else has made, the barrel distortion, vignetting and chromatic aberration will be removed automatically. This is a very cool feature but less significant, I think, than the fact that you can tune up the verticals and remove barrel distortion manually in an instant.

To me, this new feature added to the depth of other features make Lightroom the real estate photographers post processing software of choice. I think the manual lens correction feature also puts Lightroom head and shoulders above Aperture for real estate photographers. I dearly love Aperture’s brushes and ability to make “slide shows” that have both stills and video but for real estate photography if you have to choose just one Lightroom is the natural choice. Also, Lightroom 3 feels much faster on my 4Gig MacBook Pro than Aperture.

If you want to learn more about all the new Lightroom 3 features in more depth checkout the Lightroom 3 videos that Scott and Matt have on the NAPP learning center.