Photo-editing: One of the Keys to Great Property Photos

One of the most important factors in creating great property photos is post processing (photo-editing) the images after they come out of the camera.

The image above is by Aaron Leitz who is a professional real estate and architectural photographer that works in the Seattle area. Aaron’s is an example of someone who pays careful attention to making sure each of his images looks it’s best buy using post processing. His image above illustrates what a good marketing image can look like. It grabs and holds your attention.

Some of things you do in post processing are:

• Make sure all the verticals are exactly vertical.
• Make sure lens distortion (barrel distortion, dark corners, etc) are removed
• Adjust the saturation of the image. For a good marketing image the saturation is usually increased slightly.
• Adjust the tonal curve. That is, tune the tonality of the image so that the highlights are bright and crisp and there is detail in the shadow areas.
• Sharpen the image.
• Adjust the white-balance so whites look white and there is no color cast.

Adobe Lightroom, released earlier this year is fast becoming the post processing software of choice for photographers. Lightroom does all of the things above but the first item (fixing verticals). To do that you need to use Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or one of these applications.