3 Common Real Estate Photo Editing Mistakes to Avoid
Real estate photo editing can be challenging, and even the most professional photographers can make mistakes that can compromise the overall quality of their images. In this article, we will discuss three big mistakes that real estate photographers often make when editing their photos and provide tips on how to avoid them.
Mistake #1: Using Saturation, Vibrance, and Dehaze when Editing Real Estate Photos
The first mistake that many photographers make when editing real estate photos is using saturation, vibrance, and dehaze. While these tools can be helpful in some situations, they can also cause a lot of problems if they’re not used correctly. One of the biggest issues with these tools is that they can create color casts in your images.
hen you increase saturation, vibrance, or dehaze, you are starting over a saturation scale between advancing colors and receding colors. Advancing colors are your warm tones, while receding colors are your cool tones. What gets saturated first? The warm tones. You don’t want reds, yellows, and oranges to get over-saturated while blues stay neutral. This will make your photos look unnatural and exaggerated.
Similarly, dehaze is designed to remove atmospheric haze from outdoor photos. However, if you use it on interior photos, it can cause muted colors to become oversaturated and clash with other elements in the image. In addition, the algorithms of saturation, vibrance and dehaze are pretty similar, therefore they will overlap, causing further problems.
To avoid these issues, it’s best to use a more neutral approach when editing real estate photos. Instead of focusing on pops of color, aim for contrast. You can increase the white slider and decrease the black slider to make things stand out.
Rather than relying on tools like saturation and vibrance, focus on adjusting your white balance settings and treatment profiles to ensure that the colors in your images look as natural as possible.
Mistake #2: Over-lifting Shadows in Real Estate Photo Editing
Another common mistake that photographers make when editing real estate photos is over-lifting shadows. This refers to the process of brightening up the darker areas of an image, such as corners or rooms with poor lighting.
While it’s important to lift shadows a little bit to bring out more detail, over-exaggerating this can make your images look washed out and over-processed. This is a frequent issue in real estate photo editing, because the contrast between the bright areas of the image and the shadows becomes too extreme.
To avoid this mistake, try to find a balance between lifting shadows and maintaining a natural-looking contrast. One way to do this is to use the “shadows” and “blacks” sliders in Lightroom or other editing software to adjust the brightness and contrast of specific areas of the image.
Another way to avoid over-lifting shadows is to use HDR photography. HDR photography allows you to capture a wider range of light and dark tones in a single image, which means you won’t have to lift the shadows as much in post-processing. This can give you a more natural-looking image without sacrificing the details.
Mistake #3: Over-sharpening Real Estate Photos
One common mistake when editing raw files is over-sharpening. Sharpening is used to adjust the contrast between light and dark edges, and because most newer cameras have automated sharpening functions, over-sharpening is very common. To find out what the ACTUAL raw files look like, photographers can select a neutral or flat profile to see what their sensor is really picking up.
Adding too much sharpening can lead to jagged edges and pixelation, which will get worse when files are syndicated. To determine the appropriate level of sharpening, photographers can zoom in and out of the image to see how it appears in different sizes. If sharpening is necessary, use the mask slider to selectively sharpen only within a certain limit of edge detection.
Manual sharpening is necessary to produce the best outcome for the image. In Lightroom, the masking slider is used to adjust the level of sharpening selectively. To check the effect of the masking slider, hold down the Alt key and move the slider. This shows a white and black image, where white areas represent the edges that will be sharpened, and black areas remain unsharpened.
Conclusion
By avoiding these three common real estate photo editing mistakes, you can create images that are more professional-looking and appealing to potential clients. Remember to focus on maintaining a natural color balance, finding the right balance between lifting shadows and maintaining contrast, and avoiding over-sharpening your images — or let Fotober handle it with professional precision.
By being aware of these mistakes and taking the time to correct them—or partnering with Fotober’s professional real estate photo editing services and video editing—you can take your real estate photography to the next level and attract higher-paying clients who value quality.
