Photography For Real Estate

Back in September I wrote a post about ReMask, a masking plugin by Topaz. Topaz just released a Beta of a new improved version of ReMask that’s called ReMask2.
This new version is pretty amazing! It’s very intuitive to use, fast, and best of all it does a fantastic job of quickly knocking out skies with [...]

In the interest of covering a broad range of software alternatives for correcting verticals, barrel distortion I want to summarize two other applications:
ShiftN: A reader pointed out this free Windows only application to me. I’d heard of it but never tried it before. Since I recently purchased Parallels for my Mac, so I can tryout [...]

Several recent questions and comments from readers made me realize that the posts I have on PTLens are several years old. Ever since I’ve been doing this blog I’ve been recommending PTLens as an alternative for fixing verticals and barrel distortion but as of the summer of 2008 Tom Niemann released a version of PTLens [...]

Last week I got a request from Karl Hoelscher, who would like to know what techniques people are using to sharpen real estate images.
So I’ll start off by saying that I depend on Lightroom 2 for my sharpening needs. Before Lightroom 2 was released  for many years I used PhotoKit Sharpener, by PixelGenius. PhotoKit Sharpener [...]

Scott Hargis just put up a excellent tutorial on his blog on how to keep your verticals from converging.
Scott’s main point is if you are not diligent about keeping your verticals from converging, nobody will take you serious as a professional interior photographer. Scott goes through a step by step  8 minute tutorial on how [...]

The shot on the right, of my son’s 1890 Dutch Colonial farm house with a complicated lacy skyline is what I use to test masking techniques and Photoshop masking plugins (click on the image to see a large version). I’ve added the garish Spanish blue sky just so it’s easy to see how the details [...]

Yesterday Mike Martin pointed out to me that Adobe has announced Photoshop Elements 8 for both the Mac and Windows. Here’s the press release. It appears that Adobe has finally synchronized the Windows and Mac version. For years the Mac version was always behind the Windows version. This new version of PSE is going to [...]

Last week, Rusty Freeman passed along a link to this site that has some nice replacement skies. I’ve added it to the Resource page.
While on the subject of replacing skies it’s worth while bringing up the subject of how to do the replacement. As with anything in Photoshop there are many ways to select just [...]

While cleaning up the blog I ran across the summary of a series of posts and discussions from two years ago on the subject of ethics. Two years ago this was a fairly heated discussion with opinions all over the map so what I did was attempt to summarize the general consensus of how readers [...]

Marketing is all about getting attention. The front shot of your real estate marketing photos are much like a fishing lure. Fishing lures are iridescent, bright and shiny so they stand out in a background where everything looks that same. Giving your marketing photos, especially your front shot, some punch is a good way to [...]

First of all I want to thank AndyAnderson76541 for letting me talk about his photo in this post. I’ve been admiring the look of the HDR shots that Andy shoots from his pole with a Panasonic Lumix LX3. I’ve also been giving him a bad time about having cars in the driveway. Like his original [...]

Tourbuzz Full Browser Mode: I pointed out earlier that Tourbuzz was doing some updates to their tour product. In the final release they have a new feature I really like. They call it “full browser” mode. Very cool! They essentially remove all the branding stuff and make the photos fill up the whole browser window [...]

I first discovered the Atticfire site and did a post on it back in Oct of 2007. Since that time participants in the PFRE discussion group managed to reverse engineer how the Atticfire team creates the dramatic effect in their images.
Because back in 2007 I pestered Eric Prine to tell me what they were doing [...]

I got a question about from a reader last week asking about the best way to create a fire in the fireplace with Photoshop. He said he had seen the tutorial that shows how to put flames on text but having trouble making the jump to making a fire place look convincing.
Yes, there is more [...]

I noticed that the Layers Magazine site has a nice tutorial by Sean Duggan on Exposure Blending In Photoshop. I did a post about a month ago that covered specific use of this general blending technique that covered dealing with  interior windows.
The thing I like about Sean’s article is that it nicely complements my post. [...]