Unless you have the kind of relationship with your real estate photographer that we do with many of our clients, post-processing for your listing photos may still be a mystery to you.
What is it that keeps your gallery files from being zipped and shipped over the morning after your photoshoot.
We know that you know it’s worth it. But we also want you to know why.
Today’s post offers a behind the scenes glimpse of that magic happening to your images in the time between shoot and upload.
Balancing Light Temperatures
The number of windows in a room, the home’s location, and even time of day can affect lighting throughout a home. Think about using a flash versus none or the difference between the lightbulbs you have in various lamps and fixtures at home.
Unfortunately, for buyers scrolling through your listing photos, stark differences can be quite distracting. So, real estate photographers “balance light temperatures” across the gallery.
This means they edit lighting in order to bring the entire gallery to a light, bright, and airy middle ground. They do this by reducing ultra bright highlights, lifting shadows, and saturating blacks, among other things.
Color Correcting in Tandem
In tandem with balancing light temperatures, your editor is adjusting color saturation and playing with hue and tint, too. This is how we enhance the green trees and warm exterior evening lighting, for instance.
Or, while brightening a kitchen shot, you could kick up the contrast and increase saturation on a countertop close-up, to make the natural grey veining through gorgeous white marble really pop.
Note, however, that it is always our goal (and responsibility) to accurately represent a space. Because eventually, a buyer is going to see the real thing. Best to keep it enhanced - not unreal.
Final Touches on Staging
Often, photographers send a preparation checklist ahead of their appointment to ensure everything is in place. Still, even the best planning won’t escape uncontrollable factors like weather and staging mishaps.
Luckily, we live in an age where we can make these kinds of corrections digitally:
Crop images for best framing
Remove distracting objects
Add minor details (fire in the fireplace, flowers in a vase)
Replace cloudy skies with a clear day
Vertical correction can straighten the strange curving or odd distortion that sometimes results from an awkward angle taken for “full effect.”
In the rare case where zero staging has taken place, we can also virtually stage to provide depth and perspective in each room.
Your Gallery’s End User Experience
Once you’ve got the gallery’s overall look and feel where you want it, the last order of business is to ensure visual integrity from photographer’s files to listing upload.
We always resize listing photos to real estate site specs. Any distortion in your gallery images can have you overlooked in a heartbeat. Making sure every photo is uniform and fully viewable to the end user is a must.
To learn more about what DMD does behind the scenes of our post-processing of real estate gallery photos, feel free to call or contact us through the site!