The reality is that once you get the marketing and customer service figured out a good real estate photographer in a large metro area can land more shoots than they can they can process. Very frequently I encounter real estate photography spouse teams where one spouse does the shooting and one does the processing. This is a natural solution to the problem of being post processing limited. But what do you do if you don’t have a spouse you can team with?

In the last six months I’ve been contacted by at least five different companies in India that are soliciting real estate photography work that they will turn around in 12 to 18 hours for $1 to $3 USD per image ( $3 for HDR and EF). I was ready to write a post today about how how real estate photographers could take advantage of these off-shore services to go beyond their post processing limit. But after thinking about it, I realized that these days with high unemployment all over why not just make use of those folks in your local area that are quite capable of being taught to do your processing exactly the way you want it. Or, looking at it another way if you are someone that likes working with Photoshop and Photomatix set yourself up a business as a real estate photography post processing business. You might be one of those folks I run into a lot that like the photo-editing part of real estate photography but can’t really get into the marketing that it takes to build up a good following of real estate agents to shoot for.

Here is what I think a real estate post processing service would look like:

1. You’d have to be good  and fast at Photoshop, Lightroom and Photomatix and EnfuseGUI.
2. You’d have to know real estate photography to the point where you know how to do all the standard real estate post processing. Converging verticals, barrel distortion, HDR, Exposure Fusion, window masking, sky replacement etc.
3. You’d have to have a way of easily collecting and distributing images. Like a FTP server, Pogo Plug, DropBox or some similar service where you could easily exchange image files with clients.
4. You’d have to be willing to do exactly what your photographer client wanted. HDR, Exposure Fusion and possibly window masking and sky replacement in exactly the way the client wanted it.
5. You’d have to be able to turn around a job fast… probably within 12 hours guaranteed. Reliability and consistency would be a major issue to your clients.
6. You’d have to be price competitive with India or provide a level of service post processors in India couldn’t provide.

What does everyone think? Are there photographers out there that would use a service like this? Are there people out there that would want to provide a service like this?

UPDATE: July 14. OK, this is obviously a popular idea! There are many folks that are interested in providing real estate photography post processing. What I’m going to do to help real estate post processors get started is that I’m going to create a list of links on the PFRE blog right hand side-bar (just above the PFRE Idol list of links) to the first 25 real estate post processors that send me their name or company name and a URL that describes their real estate photography post processing business. I’d like to see contact information, example of your work and statement of what services you provide. There are several people working on such real estate photography business pages. I’ll list the links in first come first serve order. To take advantage of this offer leave a comment with your info on this post or contact me at: larry @ lohrman dot com

Thanks for everyone’s discussion and ideas on this subject!

As you can see in Tom Hogarty’s preview of lens correction technology there are two parts that real estate photographers are likely to use heavily:

1. The manual correction of perspective (fixing converging verticals) that works much like PTlens has worked for years. This is always going to be manual.
2. The lens distortion part, which can be done automatically, if there is a profile for the particular lens that was used to shoot the photo being corrected. This automatic profile based lens correction works like PTlens too.

It turns out that the availability of these lens profiles is key to whether or not you can use the automatic correction feature. Adobe has released a number of lens profiles with ACR 6.0 for Canon, Nikon, Sigma, Sony and Tamron lenses. But since it’s not practical for anyone to supply correction profiles for all lenses, Adobe supplies a lens profile creator that allows you to create profiles for your own lenses if profiles for those lenses are not available and there is a user forum for making lens and a process for submitting the profiles you create to Adobe for inclusion in the lens profile database.

Not surprisingly, DxO Labs, who distributes DxO Optics Pro, recently criticized  Adobe’s approach of letting users create lens profiles. DxO Labs would have you think that making a lens profile involves rocket science and massive higher mathematics that can only be done by trained professionals in properly equipped DxO optics laboratories. This must be why DxO Optics Pro costs $299 USD. They have to recover the cost of hundreds of optical engineers required to produce lens profiles. Note that DxO doesn’t supply profiles for EVERY lens either. If your lens is not supported by DxO you just have to wait and hope it’s supported in a future release.

I have not created a Adobe lens profile with Adobe lens profile creator and I’ve not seen any images that compare corrections done with DxO and ACR 6.0 but I think the correction quality done by PTlens is a good indicator of what kind of lens profiles possible for users to create for the Adobe lens correction database. Thomas Niemann, the developer of PTLens single handedly created all the lens profiles used by PTlens which he sells for $25 USD. I’d like to publicly thank Thomas for all the hard work that he’s put into PTLens in the last several years. The Lightroom 3 release with it’s PTLens like lens correction technology built-in will undoubtedly have a negative impact on PTLens sales. But for Aperture users or those that don’t use Lightroom PTLens will still be a great lens and perspective correction alternative.

I don’t want to trivialize the amount of work required to create a good lens profile. Not everyone will have the patience required to create good one but I believe that with in 6 months there will be plenty of Adobe profiles for all the lenses you need. In the mean time manually removing barrel distortion will take a second or two longer for each image. You don’t need a profile for that.

For those of you that are super picky about your automatic lens correction as usual you will probably be able to do a trial of DxO and Lightroom to compare the difference between lens correction profiles.

Vince and his Propertysnaps real estate photography business are a real success story. Vince launched his company in 2006 just about the time I started doing the PFRE blog. Vince has now built his business into a very successful, independent, multiperson full service real estate photography business that besides photography does, twilight photography, elevated 10 pole (a big pole that he built himself) photography, floor plans, aerial photography, copywriting and property websites.

The skyline in Vince’s example has a pretty simple skyline. Sometimes you will encounter more complicated skylines with lots of trees. Here is another skyline replacement technique that you can use for the tough skylines. Always give Vince’s approach first because it’s faster.

Here are the basic necessities that real estate photographers need to do to post process images:

1. Tone Map or Exposure Fuse bracketed images: I haven’t even tried the new HDR features in CS5 yet but you don’t need a $699 application to do either tone mapping or EF. Photomatix is still the best bang for your buck for tone mapping and also has Exposure fusion. It’s worth noting that the majority of real estate photographers these days use EF rather than HDR.
2. Adjust images: Adjust exposure, white balance, saturation, presence and the tonal curve.
3. Straighten the image: Remove converging verticals, rotate so key horizontals so the look horizontal.
4. Lens correction: Remove barrel distortion and chromatic aberration.
5. Hand blend windows: In some situations to get the very best view out windows, you will need to use layering to enhance the view out windows.
6. Re-size images: Downsize images from the original out of camera size to delivery size.
7. Sharpening: After doing any or all of #1 through #6 most images need some sharpening to look their best.

There are three far less expensive alternatives to  a full version of Photoshop CS5 do these:

1. Lightroom 3 (still in beta2 right now): Tom Hogarty demos in his recent sneek peak video suggests that the Lightroom 3 release will be able to do everything. Brushes go a long way to allowing you to do #5.
2. Photoshop Elements 8: PSE 8 will do everything on the list above and has a list price of $99 USD. I’ve seen the Windows version at Costco for $69 and it is currently $69.99 at Adobe store through 5/10/2010 (a mothers day special).
3. Aperture 3: This alternative is pretty good at doing everything above except for #3 and the barrel distortion part of #4. The PTlens application works well to handle #3 and #4 but it takes a round-trip to an outside application. I’ll be comparing Aperture 3 and Lightroom 3 in more detail when Lightroom 3 ships.

I think PSE 8 is the biggest bang for your post processing buck for those wanting to get started at the lowest possible price. As all around best solution for real estate post processing I lean towards Lightroom. If you are a long time Photoshop user and you can get to CS5 with a upgrade this is probably the best version of Photoshop that I’ve seen in many years.

Well “content aware fill” may be that super feature that does it for you. It sure looks cool to me! Content aware scaling in CS4 is great but I have to say that content aware fill knocks my socks off! The video on the right demonstrates content aware fill.

Adobe’s CS5 launch event is scheduled for Monday April 12. Will you be upgrading to Photoshop CS5? ]]> http://photographyforrealestate.net/2010/03/25/content-aware-fill-a-new-super-feature-coming-in-photoshop-cs5/feed/ 14 http://photographyforrealestate.net/2009/11/24/topaz-remask-2-a-lightning-fast-way-to-mask-windows-or-skies/ http://photographyforrealestate.net/2009/11/24/topaz-remask-2-a-lightning-fast-way-to-mask-windows-or-skies/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:02:24 +0000 larry http://photographyforrealestate.net/?p=3668 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 complex skylines or windows with plants or other objects sitting in front of the windows. The price is reasonable too, just $70 USD. This is effectively half of what Mask Pro 4.1 and Fluid mask (the competition) costs.

After using ReMask2 for a while and getting excited about how well it works I decided to tryout Fluid mask and Mask Pro 4.1. I’ve never used Fluid mask before but I’ve used Mask Pro many times over the years in it’s many forms. Mask Pro been around for years (used to be owned by Extensis) but I could never get excited about it because it always seemed expensive for the job it did.

After trying Fluid mask and refreshing my memory about Mask Pro, I realized what I liked so much about ReMask2; it is simple to understand and straight forward to use. I installed ReMask2 and started using it without reading any instructions. It is intuitive to use and does what it’s supposed to do. On the other hand Fluid Mask feels overly complicated. I understand that there is frequently a trade-off between simple and powerful. But for my taste ReMask2 strikes a good balance between simplicity and power. So if you are not satisfied with your ability to quickly mask out skies or windows you might want to give ReMask2 a try. There’s a 30 day free trial.

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 windows only applications, I decided to try it out. ShiftN corrects converging verticals, rotation and barrel distortion. To correct barrel distortion you must give it a “radial distortion parameter” for your lens. I must say that I am impressed by ShiftN’s approach at automatically correcting converging verticals. For many images it is quick and easy. It sometimes needs some help identifying the most significant verticals. It identifies all the verticals that it is using for the correction algorithm and you can choose to throw out the ones that are not walls (like the red lines in the photo to the right). Windows users that need to keep software costs at a minimum should give ShiftN a try. It is a very useable application and the price is hard to beat!

DxO Optics Pro: Many advanced real estate photographers like DxO Optics Pro because it can save time by processing images in batch mode much like the PTlens. Additionally it has corrections for a few more distortions than other correction software. DxO Optics Pro does the following kinds of corrections:

• Lens distortion correction: Barrel/Pincushion distortion, complex distortion (whatever that is) and fisheye distortion
• Vignetting distortion: Light fall-off in the corners
• Chromatic aberration: Color fringing in high contrast areas
• Lens softness correction: Much like capture sharpening or adjusting clarity in Camera Raw or Lightroom
• Volume anamorphosis distortion: Comes from projecting a 3D object in real life on to a 2D sensor
• Converging verticals and horizon correction: The familiar converging vertical and camera rotation problem

Version 6 of DxO Optics Pro was just recently released. There is a thread in the PFRE flickr discussion group discussing this new release that has a lot of good information and insights.

In the past I’ve tried out DxO Optics Pro a couple of times but never become a regular user of it because I had bad experiences with it’s reliability. To be honest I’ve also have never been able to get past DxO’s pricing philosophy where they charge $100 more if your camera has a full-frame sensor than if it has a cropped sensor. To me, this application is just too expensive for what you get.

Here’s why I think PTLens is the ideal real estate photographers tool for using with Lightroom:

1. It automatically fixes barrel distortion based on EXIF data. That is it recognizes which lens you used and knows how to fix barrel distortion for that particular lens. PTlens a huge database of the most common lenses included. If you have a lens that’s not in it’s database (not likely) you can create some calibration images, send them to Tom and he will add them to the DB for you. For wide-angle lenses Tom claims that it does a better job since PTLens uses up to 3 parameters to correct distortion where PS only uses 1 parameter
2. It can fix converging verticals every bit as as nicely as the “Distort>Lens Correction…” in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.
3. The stand alone version has a batch mode that will do barrel distortion processing on all the images in a folder. The only other lens correction software that does this is DxO that costs in the neighborhood of $200 depending what camera body you have.
4. It is available for Windows, Vista and Mac OS X 10.5.2 or higher (Intel hardware only) and can run on Unix using a Windows simulator.
5. It works as a external editor for Lightroom ( version 2.0 and over), Aperture 2.1 and Photoshop, plus you get a stand alone version. In Lightroom you can make PTLens corrections and then come back into Lightroom and adjust RAW settings.
6. It cost $25!

What all this means is that for most beginning real estate photographers Lightroom and PTLens is all the post processing software you need. The only area this combination doesn’t address is cloning out unwanted objects and using layer masks to control window exposures and replacing skies. These last three areas are techniques that take more time and are more advanced techniques.

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 is sharpening plugin for Photoshop. If you only use Photoshop it is one of the best sharpening plugins around. It was PhotoKit Sharpener that introduced me the concept of the three stages of sharpening:

1. Capture sharpening – Where you compensate for the weaknesses of the capture equipment.
2. Creative sharpening – Where you use sharpening to draw the eye to the subject of the image.
3. Output sharpening – Where you optimize the image for the output media.

In real estate photography you need primarily 1 and 3 where the output media is primarily the screen. For those that use Lightroom the sharpening sliders in the Develop module Sharpening sliders are everything you need for capture sharpening. I have to say that even though technically not sharpening my favorite feature of Lightroom and Camera RAW is the Clarity slider. It is fantastic and I use it on almost every image. I can’t live without it!

For output screen sharpening the export feature of Lightroom there is a export option to sharpen for the screen (online image display). Adobe actually licensed the PhotoKit Sharpener from PixelGenius for use in Lightroom output sharpening, so it’s PhotoKit that Lightroom users are using when they do output sharpening. For those that would like an in depth walk through of using Lightroom sharpening, there is a excellent two part series over at x-equals.com. The first part is on Capture sharpening and the second part is on output sharpening.

What is your real estate photography sharpening workflow?