Archive for the 'Photo Editing' Category

Aperture vs Lightroom – Which is Best for Real Estate Photography?

August 17th, 2010

Mac users starting out in real estate photography are faced with a choice of whether to go with Lightroom or Aperture for photo management/editing. Back in February I did a comparison of of Lightroom and Aperture just after Aperture 3 was released. Now that both Aperture 3 and Lightroom 3 have been out for a [...]

Another Look At Attic Fire

August 1st, 2010

I recently got an email from Atticfire that reminded me that I haven’t mentioned them for over a year. 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 [...]

Is Post Processing For Real Estate Photography is A Business Opportunity?

July 13th, 2010

In the last few months I’ve talked to a number of real estate photographers who have reached a point in their business that they have become limited in the number homes they can shoot by post processing. This occurs primarily for photographers that shoot HDR and Exposure Fusion.
The reality is that once you get the [...]

Will The Availability Of Quality Adobe Lens Correction Profiles Be a Problem?

May 23rd, 2010

For real estate photographers straightening verticals and removing lens distortion (mostly barrel distortion) is a big deal. For those that use Aperture and Lightroom traditionally, this step in the workflow has required a “round-trip” to PTlens, Photoshop or Photoshop Elements for every image you need to correct manually. The advent of  the lens correction technology [...]

Sky Replacement Tutorial And Some Down Under Skys

May 17th, 2010

My friend Vince deStefano down in Melbourne, AU just sent me a link to his free sky replacement library and his YouTube video tutorial on how to do sky replacement. I’m going to add Vince’s library and tutorial to the PFRE blog Resource page.
Vince and his Propertysnaps real estate photography business are a real success [...]

Photoshop CS5: Do you Need It For Real Estate Photography?

May 9th, 2010

A couple of days ago the FedEx guy brought my Photoshop CS5 update. While I was loading the update I was thinking about the fact that the day is fast approaching that applications like Lightroom and Aperture are are going to take over post processing for real estate photographers. I get every Photoshop update as [...]

Preview of Lens Correction Solution for Camera Raw 6 and Lightroom 3

May 3rd, 2010

This is a subject that should pique the intrest of all real estate photographers! See Tom Hogarty’s post on this subject here.

Content Aware Fill- A New Super Feature Coming in Photoshop CS5

March 25th, 2010

So if you are the Adobe Photoshop product manager planning new Photoshop features you have to be thinking, “…let’s see, what kind of compelling new features will we have to put into Photoshop this time, to make sure everyone wants to update?” Because Photoshop users are all thinking, “…these days I do most of my [...]

Topaz Remask 2: A Lightning Fast Way To Mask Windows Or Skies

November 24th, 2009

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 [...]

Two More Applications For Correcting Verticals, Barrel Distortion and More

November 6th, 2009

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 [...]

PTLens: Correct Verticals, Barrel Distortion, Vignetting, Chromatic Aberration

November 4th, 2009

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 [...]

What Is Your Real Estate Photography Sharpening Workflow?

October 18th, 2009

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: Nobody Will Take You Seriously If Your Verticals Are Converging

October 11th, 2009

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 [...]

Topaz ReMask: Is It As Good As They Say?

September 30th, 2009

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 [...]

Adobe Announces Photoshop Elements 8

September 29th, 2009

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 [...]