Photography For Real Estate

Nick Jones reminded me last week that I pointed out in Nov that Adobe initially announced that only CS5 users could upgrade to CS6. But I did not pass on the fact that Adobe finally caved in to public pressure and changed their upgrade policy. Here is Adobe’s current upgrade policy for the up coming [...]

Thanks to Harry Lim in Orlando, FL for pointing this video out to me. This is a meticulous demonstration by Roger Brooks, a Architectural and Interior Photographer in Vancouver, BC demonstrating  a lighting/post process layering technique commonly used in high-end Architectural Interior photography. Note that I show it here as an educational illustration of how many Architectural [...]

My current software recommendation for real estate photographers are as follows: If you want just the bare essentials to do the real estate photography job, PSE is the photo editor you are looking for. It runs everywhere, costs $79 and does everything you need to do as a real estate photographer. If you can afford [...]

Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements 10 are scheduled to be released October 3rd. I point this out because I think Adobe Photoshop Elements is becoming the Photoshop of choice for beginning real estate photographers. While I dearly love my Photoshop CS5 ($670 USD) and Lightroom ($210 USD) and there are many wonderful benefits of both, [...]

I had a request last week to help an up and coming real estate photographer in the Seattle area learn how to make sure the views look great in his interior photos. He was lamenting that he had the opportunity to shoot homes with great views but he couldn’t pull the windows with his lighting [...]

I’ve been working on a set of YouTube video tutorials that I’m going to use to go along with the new edition of my Photography For Real Estate eBook. This weekend as I was working a Lens Distortion Tutorial when someone submitted a Master Bath shot with barrel distortion and the verticals off. Since the contest contestants [...]

If you have Photoshop CS5 and do real estate photography you should know about how to use the puppet warp feature to straighten walls in architectural photos. Thanks to Jeff for sending me this video! I’d never paid much attention to puppet warp but it is a really cool feature. Note that this feature was [...]

Mike Kelley sent me this tutorial video that illustrates his compositing technique for adding extra drama to twilight shots. Mike describes his technique as follows: The technique is pretty simple but gives great results. I have my camera set up on a tripod with a remote, and Pocketwizards connecting the camera to the flash in [...]

Like Scott Hargis says, there are a gazillion ways to replace a sky. For real estate photography you want something fast and easy. Scott’s video tutorial is just that, quick and easy. You don’t even have to have a library of skies for this one! You just change the color of the clouds from grey [...]

Thanks to Jonathan Calvert of Houston, TX for passing along his tutorial for a quick and easy way to replace skies. Jonathan says, “I know there has been a hundred tutorials on sky replacement, but they all seem too “intricate” for fast turn around real estate pictures, especially if you have multiple outdoor shots on [...]

In real estate  photography the front exterior shot is THE most important shot. Why? Because a thumbnail of the front exterior shot needs to have the visual power to grab the attention of the home buyer scanning through lists of listings on real estate sites and entice them to look at the listing further. On most [...]

Now that real estate photographers can straighten verticals and remove barrel distortion in Lightroom 3 the only reason they need Photoshop or Photoshop Elements any more is to mask windows or replace skys right? If they had layers in Lightroom and Aperture then they wouldn’t need Photoshop! This is onOne Software’s line of thinking. So [...]

Doing quick Photoshop masks for sky replacement or window replacement on interior shots is a frequent need that real estate photographers have. I created this video a number of years ago but have had several situations recently that people wanted to mask interior windows. The crux of creating such masks is that the mask edges [...]

I recently got an email from Atticfire that reminded me that I haven’t mentioned them for a while. I first discovered the Atticfire 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. Back [...]

Last week I was talking to Kris Bjarne Haug, a real estate photographer in the Greater New Orleans area and noticed that Kris has a site dedicated to his virtual staging product. I’ve gotten mixed feedback from agents and photographers on this subject so I was anxious to get Kris’s perspective on how things were [...]

I’ve always been amazed by how many full blown Photoshop features you get in Photoshop Elements for around 1/10th the price of Photoshop CS5. The new Photoshop Elements version 9 released in Sept of this year takes this concept to the next level. PSE9 now has layer masks, content-aware fill, refine-edge, and improved panorama stitching. [...]

I was watching a live.twit.tv re-run this morning and Leo Laporte was ranting about a new App he was using that creates 360 cylindrical panoramas on the fly as you pan your iPhone around. As a long time 360 image hacker that has spent 100s of hours stitching 360 images, I couldn’t help myself. I blew 99 cents [...]

Every time DxO comes out with a new version of DxO Optics Pro I spend some time with the trial version to see how the new version works. In the past I’ve never purchased it because it felt like it has a lot overlap with Lightroom and its user interface never felt right to me. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]