Photography For Real Estate

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]