When looking into real estate photography, we always suggest you use a professional. However, if this isn’t an option or you simply want to have fun doing it yourself, check out our guide below.
Clean, Declutter and Style!
- This step may seem obvious, but it is imperative to your photos that you clean your rooms.
- Declutter your rooms as much as possible, yes it is true less is more! give your potential buyers a chance to imagine themselves and their future in your property.
- Add a personal styling touch to your rooms, this will help prospective buyers to forge an emotional connection with your property. Fresh flowers, books, bowls pillows are all great ways to make a house a home
Cameras
When finding cameras to use, seek one that captures lots of light and that has a wide lens – this will create bright clear images with as much information about a room as possible.
A DSLR isn’t required but will give you dramatically higher quality photos.
The DSLR allows for a wide-angle lens, you can then capture as much of your room as possible.
They also allow you to control and maximise the amount of light you capture giving your photos more depth and larger rooms.
Lighting
When thinking about lighting your rooms your best option is natural lighting, therefore choose your photo day carefully. Pick a sunny bright morning to take your photographs, and drawback all curtains possible.
Take one photo with the lights off, and one photo with the lights on, this way you’ll have two options in your editing stage.
Tripods
Tripods are incredibly handy, they will assist you in taking straight, unblurred photos.
Straight Photos
When all the verticle lines within your room are straight you will have achieved a straight photo. Your tripod helps you keep the camera straight, you’ll notice that if you point the camera ever-so-slightly up or down, the vertical lines within your room will start to slant. They’ll distort in one direction or the other.
Unblurred Photos
This one is pretty straight forward, the tripod will hope your camera still, allowing you to capture unblurred photos, especially with a higher ISO in use for more light in your shots
Angles and Height
The height of your tripod will be based upon the rooms you are capturing, start at chest height and adjust accordingly. You don’t want to show too much of the roof or too much of the furniture legs (however there are exceptions to this rule, for example, capturing a ceiling feature or rug).
To include as much of the room in the photo as possible, we suggest you use the far corner of the bedroom as a focal point and use it to align your camera in making it verticle
However! Get creative! Use your angles to accentuate the beautiful features of your property, for example, if you have a long island bench in your kitchen, use an angle that accentuates this.
What do I Photograph?
We suggest the following:
- 2 wide-angle shots of each bedroom, the kitchen, and the living room.
- 1 photo of the bathroom, unless it’s particularly beautiful or spacious.
- 1-3 photos of the backyard unless it has some unique features. And then 1-2 shots of the front of the home to show off the ‘curb appeal’.
- 1 shot each of features such as laundry room, garage, and pantry.
Editing
Usually, when editing images we would use Photoshop or Lightroom, however not everyone has access to these products.
If not there are a few ways around it.
- Consider a Photo Editing Service – an editing service can cost $2-$10 per photo (depending on the work needed) and they finalized the images within a day or two, potentially saving you lots of time.
- Find a free editing software such as Paint.NET (for beginners) or GIMP (for advanced users)
Straighten the lines
Use the crop tools and grid tools to straighten your image if it is not already. If you’re using paint.Net you will find this in Layers > Rotate/Zoom.
Even out the light
When shooting interiors or exteriors, you might encounter uneven lighting. To fix this, adjust shadows and highlights – please note that some of these options may not be available on your editing platform. By dragging the Shadows bar to the right your shadows will lighten and vice versa. Make sure that it is a safe middle ground. If you have harsh highlights on the photo, you may want to drag your highlights bar to the left in order to bring down the brightness in these overlit areas.
Adjust clarity
With adjusting the clarity, you will be sharpening the image and gives a crisper look to the image.
Curves
This can be used for colour correcting and optimizing your colours. However, it can be challenging to master. To use Curves, go to the Image or Adjustments menu (this will change according to the editing software you’re using), and click on Curves. Drag the diagonal line at the centre and pull it up to brighten the image or down to darken it. When you’re already happy with the outcome, click OK. You can freely play around with this tool and experiment in order to achieve the look that you want.
Hue and Saturation
Hue and Saturation can be used for colour correction and is similar to Curves. However, Hue and Saturation can be used to enhance the greens on exterior and landscape photos. To use Hue and Saturation, select the area in which you wish to enhance or change, and click Hue and Saturation in your menu (this will depend on the editing software you use but most likely will be within the Image or Adjustments options). From here you can change the colour or increase/decrease the saturation or lightness.
Keep it Natural
Finally, keep the image as natural as possible. It can be too easy to go overboard when editing photos so it may be worth comparing the edited image to the original.
Straighten Lines
Curves
Hue and Saturation
