10 Best Real Estate Photo Editing Techniques You Must Apply to Your Pictures

Sahana Chawla
5 min readMar 22, 2021

The modern real estate photo editing techniques hold a lot of importance in marketing and selling a property. These techniques allow the architectural images to look more professional and highlight the best features, which further helps in attracting the audience.

Professional photographers or companies offering real estate photo editing services are usually aware of the best techniques that can provide them the desired outcomes. Therefore, to also help you with the same, we are about to disclose those techniques to you.

But, before we proceed, let’s have a brief encounter on why learning the real estate photo editing techniques is so important.

Use of Learning the Real Estate Photo Editing Techniques

There are numerous reasons to mention why you should learn and understand these techniques. Let’s start with how it helps in enhancing your image editing skills.

Relying completely on your real estate photographers is not wise. Even if you have chosen the skilled ones and have provided them the best equipment to work with, the pictures still need editing before they go online.

We do have control over our skills, but we do not have control over environmental conditions. So, there is still a possibility that things might be off. You cannot always get the shots the way you have envisioned. It is one of the reasons why property owners and agents tend to hire real estate image editing services before putting the pictures online.

Now coming to the part of marketing and promotion, high-quality pictures can captivate the attention of potential buyers. It will force them to check out the property, which may lead to sales.

So, in short, you can make this all happen if you are well-versed with the best techniques for real estate image editing.

10 Common Real Estate Photography Editing Techniques

Here are the ten common as well as best photo editing techniques every real estate photo editor must be aware of to make the property images more enticing.

1. Brightness and Color Correction

Brightness and color correction is very common in digital photography. The basic photo retouching technique is used in almost every photo editing process. With it, you can enhance the contrast, tone, sharpness, color, etc., and turn an ordinary image exciting.

2. Perspective Correction

It is one of the most important techniques used in architectural and real estate photo editing. With its help, you can correct the horizontal and vertical distortions to make the property pictures look more natural.

3. Color Cast Removal

Sometimes, different types of lights can produce a tint of color in the images, giving them a negative appearance. This unwanted tint formed on the pictures is known as a color cast.

For instance, the grayish sky outside can make the yellow walls of the property look dull. Fluorescent bulbs can create a bluish tinge in the photographs.

However, with the color cast removal technique, you can neutralize or remove the unwanted tints and bring back the original color in the images.

4. Image Cleaning

To apply this technique, you need to clone the images. It can be done with the Clone Stamp Tool in Photoshop. With this method, you can eliminate the distracting or unwanted elements from the photograph.

5. Image Compositing

In this technique, visual elements from different pictures are combined to form a single, seamless picture. It creates an illusion that the elements belong to the same picture. You can apply this for real estate photos when you are stitching ambient and flash shots into one.

6. Sky Replacement

Photographs when taken on bright, sunny days appear the best. However, if your photographs were taken during dark, cloudy days, it appears dull and gloomy. To overcome this issue, you can use the sky replacement technique.

By applying this technique, your editors can easily replace the dark and dull skies with bright, blue ones. You can also add fluffy clouds to increase the appeal.

7. Photo Manipulation

In real estate photo editing, there are often cases when a part or parts of the photograph seem missing. In that case, the photo manipulation technique can help to cover it up.

Let’s say, there is a barren piece of land in front of a house. You can use the technique to cover the land with grass and make it a lush, green lawn. Similarly, if there’s a fireplace inside the house, you can apply the technique to add fire and give it a homely feel.

8. Curves Adjustment

This technique can be applied with Photoshop software. You can use this to optimize and correct the colors. But, it can be a bit difficult to master the capabilities of this tool.

For using it, you can follow the below steps.

· Select Adjustments from the Image menu.

· Choose Curves.

· A dialog box will appear. Now, select Auto.

· Pull the diagonal lines to the center.

· For brightening the picture, drag it upwards and for darkening the picture, drag it down.

· Click on OK when done.

9. Hue and Saturation Correction

This technique is similar to the above and is also available in Photoshop. With the Hue and Saturation tool, you can enhance the colors in the real estate images. To use it, simply follow the steps below.

· Select Adjustments from the Image menu.

· Choose Hue and Saturation.

· A dialog box will appear. Now, select Yellow.

· Try increasing the hue and decreasing the lightness and saturation.

· Now, change the Yellow option to Green and repeat.

· Click OK.

10. Batch Editing

In any photography, we usually face the situation of carrying out similar types of edits. In that case, you can use the batch editing technique and cut down the monotonous task.

Besides, you can also save time while editing all the images in one go. Lightroom software will be best suitable for this purpose. To apply the technique, you only need to retouch and make adjustments, and finally, sync the changes made to the rest of the pictures.

The process of real estate photo editing is not easy. It takes a lot of time to come up with pictures that have a stunning appeal. However, the impact it can have on a real estate business can’t be ignored.

So, the quicker you learn these real estate photo editing techniques, the better it will be to achieve the ideal sales target you want. With accurately edited photographs, you can present the best features of your property and convince potential buyers.

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