Get professional tips and advice from our seasoned PFRE vets on how to shoot real estate video with a DSLR more efficiently.
Being able to create HDR (high dynamic range) photos is a key component when it comes to editing images of real estate. By using the best HDR software for real estate photography, you can showcase all of the details of a property without having elements over or underexposed.
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If you are looking to take your real estate photography to the next level, the following HDR software will help you create professional and clean looking photos.
The 2017 release of the Photomatix Pro 6 features significant upgrades from the previous Photomatix software. Among the notable upgrades are a tone balancer, exposure blending, edge-aware brushes, enhanced color controls, and distortion and perspective correction tools. With these, you can easily adjust the hue, saturation, and brightness of individual colors.
Unfortunately, the user interface looks a bit dated if you compare it with other new photo editing tools. This is because this software has been in the industry for a very long time now. However, even with that, the functionality and effectiveness of this software remain solid.
When you open the software, you have two ghost reduction options, global or selective ghost reduction, which are both reliable. The Photomatix Pro 6 also comes with robust HDR Rendering Methods that allow you to customize and achieve the photo outlook you want. The methods include:
Every one of the above HRD rendering methods above has a unique adjustment set for the technique. The software comes with automatic alignment of hand-held photos.
Finally, Photomatix Pro 6 works perfectly as standalone software and can integrate with other software like Adobe Lightroom. It’s an excellent processing solution if you want to work on exposure bracket and HDR photos.
Adobe Photoshop is arguably one of the best photo editors today. The software gives you the freedom to tweak numerous aspects of your images. It also allows you to merge various exposure brackets to form a single HDR photo.
One incredible thing about using Adobe Photoshop to create HDR images is that you can always edit the same program's resulting images whenever and however you want. The only problem is that it is not easy to learn, so you may not like it at first as a newbie.
Photoshop also comes with several other photo editing tools and features. The software has everything you'd require to edit, enhance, and change any aspect of your real estate photographs. Among the things you could do with this software are, cropping out objects, adjusting the photos, or work in layers.
Photoshop is an ideal platform for users who want to manipulate and enhance existing photos with colors, levels, and lens correction tools. When it comes to subscription and packaging, you can get Adobe Photoshop in various options. For Real Estate Photography, we recommend the Photography Pack.
The Photography Pack comes with the photo editing software plus 58 step-by-step guided edits, and built-in prints and gift services to give you an unmatched experience with your real estate photos. The software comes in Disc, Mac online code, and PC online codes.
Adobe's Lightroom is the favorite software amongst professional photographers. The program comes with almost all the image editing tools available on other software except the Post-Crop Vignetting tool, Flat-Field Correction, and Profile calibration tools.
However, the software comes with a nifty profile feature that allows you to convert your raw camera files to viewable images. That particular feature is more relevant if you are a newbie try to forge a path through the real estate photo editing industry.
Lightroom also gives you a bit of creativity with a profile that mimics Instagram filters in the raw profile. You can use the profile on JPGs and raw camera images.
The latest version of Lightroom now comes with Panorama as well as HDR-merging capabilities. That way, it allows you to give your images an elongated field of view and blend multiple unique photos of different exposure into one image.
When it comes to pricing, the software is relatively affordable considering the range of tools it gives you. It only costs $9.99 per month or $119.88 per year. With that, you get easy-to-use tools that allow you to customize your photos the way you want.
Finally, the package comes with 1 TB of storage space in the cloud to ensure that you access your photo library from anywhere at any time. Lightroom is compatible with Mac OS Sierra 10.12, Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11, Windows 10, and Mac OS Platforms.
Most clients and agents today are looking for images that showcase a wide dynamic range. As a result, your images often will need to include both a well lit interior along with a natural looking exterior. This is where HDR real estate photography enters, and you'll want a software to handle this for you. Here are factors to consider
In real estate photography, you will not be taking photos for your home album or private viewing. You will have a target audience with everything you capture in the field. So when looking for your ideal HDR software, it would be best to take one that is compatible with the tools you use as a realtor.
You would probably want to share these images on blogs or other social media platforms. So you could take software that integrates with your blogging tools or photo-sharing platforms like Flickr. That way, you will significantly reduce the time and effort you take to share your photos online.
Another aspect that you would need to be keen on when buying or subscribing to HDR software for real estate photography is organization. The tool will be like your library, and you will accumulate thousands of pictures in the cloud storage as you progress in your career.
You will also have clients who want to see photo capture differently, sometimes even several years back. So we advise that you get software that allows you to keep track of your photos through thumbnail previews, search, and naming schemes.
Again, in this industry, you will take lots of pictures and create images in several formats. You will also need to customize every image for specific audiences. For that purpose, you will need a tool that allows you to create your pictures in the correct format for web displays.
The most common image formats in real estate photography are JPG, GIF, and PNG. These formats give you the freedom to compress your image sizes before you upload them on the web.
Most real estate photographers can use several devices that use different platforms like Windows,Linux, or Mac. If you are one such photographer, you need HDR photo editing software that can run on all these platforms without upgrading or buying another version.
Cross-platform compatibility for photo editing tools is a necessary aspect, even if you only use one platform on your device. You never know when you will need to change devices. You will not have to go through the hassle of buying another HDR photo editing software when you do.
The same goes for the number of computers the software allows you to use for editing. Some software licenses will restrict you to only one computer, while others will give you the freedom of as many as you can. So it would be best to look at this too.
Getting the Best HDR Software for Real Estate Photography is essential if you want to be top in the industry. There are things that you must look at before you make a subscription. We hope that this guide will help you find the right software for your specific real estate needs.
