retouching

Straightening Up

All real estate photographers straighten their photos so that vertical lines are in fact 90° vertical or very close to it. This isn’t difficult to do. But not all photographers straighten horizontal lines that have been distorted by a wide-angle lens.

Straightening horizontals is a bit more difficult and may not always be entirely possible. Wide-angle lens distortion is a fact of physics.

A very wide-angle lens was used to show the full width of the room and entire stairway. Verticals (i.e. walls) were corrected to 90° vertical. Then the stairs and the ceiling above the stairs were straightened to 0° horizontal.

There are no automatic, one-click solutions to fix crooked horizontals especially if only a portion of the photo needs to be corrected. Photoshop has its Adaptive Wide Angle Filter which can work miracles. Sometimes a photo can be separated into sections and each section corrected on its own using various transform tools. In the photo above, the picture was split into two sections where the dividing line was the edge of the glass wall.

 

Real Estate Photography, Large Bathrooms

It’s easier to photograph a large bathroom than a small bathroom and large bathrooms always look better.

A large bathroom can be photographed in a single shot so minimal photo magic is required. There’s usually no need to blend or stitch multiple photos together.

A photo of a large bathroom usually doesn’t require too much retouching. Vertical lines need to be straightened and then colour, brightness and contrast have to be adjusted.

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Real Estate Photography, Small Bathrooms

Photographing small bathrooms is usually a challenge. It can be difficult to get the camera into the best position and your reflection is visible in mirrors and glass doors. Plus, a wide-angle lens creates lots of distortion in a small room.

A shift lens can sometimes be used to prevent your reflection appearing in a mirror or glass door. But getting all or most of a tiny bathroom in a picture usually requires some photo magic.

This bathroom is smaller than it appears in this photo. No matter where I stood, I was always visible in the mirror.

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Accurately Remove Objects From Photos

This shows a house before renovation. The vehicles are a visual distraction and one car covers a small portion of the home.

I do real estate photography for construction companies that build or renovate homes in the greater Toronto area. Often I photograph a home before construction has begun and then return weeks or months later to picture the finished work.
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The customer is right even when they’re not

This photo has nothing to do with this post. It’s another view-from-my-office photo.

If you thought your home office was small or ugly, here is someone’s “vintage” 42-square-foot home office before it gets renovated. It has no functioning lights or heat. But it does have lots of nails in a wall, a very sloping floor and a sewage pipe in the corner. I didn’t ask about the dark red stains on the floor.

A small financial consulting company last week sent me four business portraits they wanted fixed. Another photographer shot these portraits three months ago and I don’t know why he or she didn’t fix the photos.
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That’s Not Cricket

Here’s an example of what happens when an organization cuts corners and goes cheap. The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants is promoting its Toronto cricket tournament which benefits school cricket teams. Good for them.

But by looking at the promotional poster for the event, it’s painfully obvious that the organizers didn’t bother to hire a professional photographer or designer. Is this poster supposed to be taken seriously or is it meant as a joke?
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Filling in the blanks

Corporate photographers and commercial photographers often produce pictures of buildings, factories and retail locations.

Customers will sometimes request the digital removal of objects such as poles, road signs, overhead wires, fire hydrants, bus stops, etc., from exterior photos.

What’s funny about such requests is the customer assumes that once an object is erased, whatever was behind that object will automatically become visible. But as every photographer knows, when something is digitally removed from a photo, it just leaves a blank spot in the picture.
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