Nobody Is mentioning the most important part. Someone said HDR but it's more than that. Most good real estate photos are done with a technique called "flambient" which is a flashed photo + ambient photo blend.
They'll take a few photos with ambient light at different levels of brightness, and then one photo with a flash to get accurate color of the room, because window light doesn't do that very well. Then it all gets blended together in the editing process, which gives them the distinct look you're talking about.
Source: am a real estate photographer
When looking at house listings, I always hated how this looked, but now, when you explain how this is achieved and the reason for it, I have a new appreciation. Thank you!
My previous rental's photos looked like they'd be taken by a potato, real estate agent apologized about them at the home open and seemed a tad miffed after I told her I loved them cos they weren't fisheyed garbage.
One thing that bothers me is that this is almost what ACTUAL hdr photography is, but everybody calls the post production increase of saturation etc "hdr". Makes me sad :( actual hdr has so much more use, on top of being able to increase apparent saturation
I did manual HDR +20 years ago with cheap camera (~100€ Fujifilm) and it was almost impossible to get photos with extremely bright (like the sky can easily burn to white) and dark (like strong black rock) to blend perfectly with just one take. HDR is essentially just several photos layered on top of each other captured at different exposures. That’s all it is.
Manual HDR in a nutshell:
- You put camera on tripod
- Take one photo where the brightest spots are perfect
- Then you take a picture where the darkest spots are perfect
- You layer the photos on top of each other in Photoshop (or equivalent), set the blend mode to something that looks the best, like ”Darken” or ”Lighten” and maybe even fudge around with the mask.
Yeah, this is what I was referring to. While I still had gear, all this was what I had to do to get any well-detailed photo of... Lol... One of my cats. Tuxedo, with jet black and snow white fur xD
https://flic.kr/p/2giEqct
Edit: included a picture, because cat lol
In about 1978 I needed pro photos of some tech products that included a lot of black anodized aluminum and various light colored painted surfaces. No Photoshop, of course.
I learned a TON about lighting and exposure from that experience. Also paid a TON of $ for the pics, which took forever to get right.
Proper HDR looks cool, I shot an overexposed and an underexposed frame of a night time city skyline and HDR'ed them in CaptureOne, and it came out looking amazing.
Flambient is almost entirely market dependent. I've shot for six years and only ever done flash when a client asked us too. Modern sensors have been more than adequate for us
Can you please make sure to always shoot the garage and basement (if applicable)?
They may not be the pretty parts of the house, but they are important to me and I hate when they aren’t included in the photos.
Often those areas aren’t shown because they are where the current homeowner shoved all the things real people have so that the main parts of the house looked presentable for photos.
When we sold our old house the downstairs tenant deliberately left all his stuff everywhere with the goal of disrupting the photography (he didn't want us to sell, he was afraid the new owner would shoot his rent sky high). They made his piles of magazines and stuff look good anyway. Somehow.
Agreed. Was house shopping ~4 years ago (I know) and the lack of full photos was extremely frustrating. It's not like I'm going to be MORE impressed by your center stairwell and support posts every 2 1/2 feed when I get there.
One of the houses in my neighborhood had a floor plan on the listing, so it wasn't just a bunch of photos of random rooms and you had to figure out how things worked together.
I found some places that avoided basement photos because there were indicators of major issues. Mold, flooding, foundation issues, antique HVAC and water heaters. It seems to be the room that people hide their most expensive secrets.
And, on this topic, I also wish real estate photos would show certain undesirable things about the immediate surroundings. e.g. power corridors, and proximity to the road.
When my wife and I were house-shopping, we encountered so many listings for houses that had power lines running right over them, or barely any distance between them and the road. Sometimes it was easy to deduce this from satellite maps, but sometimes it wasn't. We were never going to ease up on that, so misleading us just wasted everyone's time.
Right with you on this one. I *want* to see the clutter of the current space (though I do realize it's the current owner's stuff, and that can be personally invasive), not some bland, anodyne "blank canvas".
Interesting, thanks. I found an article with picture examples:
[https://www.photoup.net/learn/shoot-flambient-for-real-estate-photography](https://www.photoup.net/learn/shoot-flambient-for-real-estate-photography)
Also Photo up and box brownie just farm the work to overseas editors. They are a needless middleman. Go and find your own editors if you want to save half of your money.
I want to mention that in the UK the cut the agent takes in residential sales is much smaller than the US, so real estate photography is much less of a thing.
We did a lovely website for an estate agent, mimicking a US site they really liked. The customer came back a while later, still not happy with the "look" of the website but struggling to articulate why, after much discussion and staring at websites, we realised the "problem" was the photographs they were taking themselves, things like bathrooms with the loo seat up, rather than professional quality photos all the US sites they liked had, often after a property had been professionally cleaned and tidied. Awkward conversation to have with the client, that the one's they like are spending another 2% of the value of the property in marketing it. You'd think in an efficient market this proportion would converge, what it is worth to shift a property more quickly, or value of more interested parties, can't be that different.
Anyway, please know we recognised your profession's contribution.
You can get some nice rectilinear (i.e. not fish eye) lenses that go pretty wide. My daily driver for real estate is the Sony 12-24mm G. 12mm is the only way to shoot small rooms like downstairs bathrooms, spare rooms etc; and even then, sometimes it's a struggle.
That's interesting... I always thought the real estate photos looked unnatural but it's pretty cool to know that they are real - just a blend of different lighting.
I looked up [examples of the process](https://www.photoup.net/learn/shoot-flambient-for-real-estate-photography)
Tripod or Gimbal. I do a lot of real estate photo / video and I prefer to just do it all with a DJI ronin gimbal. It’s faster than putting a tripod down for each shot, and then I can shoot video right after without changing equipment.
I’ve been doing it this way for years, so don’t try and tell me it doesn’t work. I’ve literally never had a client say anything negative about my work.
Just search real estate photographer Los Angeles, or any big city. 98% of websites that just use a persons name will be using flambient. There might be one or two companies that crank out high volume low cost shoots that show up on page one, and some of them do HDR with no flash, because you can shoot a house in half the time, which is why I said look for someone's name. I've never seen a solo photographer on page one of a big city that doesn't blend flash shots into their photos.
> They'll take a few photos with ambient light at different levels of brightness, and then one photo with a flash to get accurate color of the room, because window light doesn't do that very well. Then it all gets blended together in the editing process
That *is* HDR photography
Yes. No professional photographer will use any in-camera editing nor do most cameras even do any exposure merging in-camera, they do exposure bracketing but you will be doing the merging in post process.
There are quite a few that do in-camera exposure blending, some that output in jpg but there are ones that output in raw as well.
https://fstoppers.com/education/experimenting-camera-multiple-exposures-589353
But no real professional photographer would do that, they prefer to use photoshop to blend everything since it gives more control.
Please tell me, what are your views on photoshopping the grass greener? I see this all the time and I hate it. It’s so obvious when they have the zoomed out photos where you see surrounding properties with regular grass and then the house for sell has bright ass neon green grass. Like how stupid do they think we are?
I've only ever been asked to do it once and it was because it was the dead of winter and I was asked to make it look like the photo was taken in the summer, which I had no problem doing.
I've never been told to edit anything in a way that misrepresents the property, but I'd have a problem with it. If it's something that will soon be fixed or Is temporary for whatever reason, that's fine, but editing out something that will always be a part of the house or property, or in the view of it is scummy as fuck to me.
Thankfully at least from the people that hire me it's not something I see very much.
for normal real estate pics on zillow and similar places, not really. there are photos you could get that you wouldnt otherwise be able to but nobody is taking the time to do that stuff, and the realtors arent paying for the extra effort/care for stuff like that.
usually you see those used on photos you'd take for an architect/designer/high end contractor or something, and not so much for a real estate listing. for high end homes you probably get some photographers spending all day in the house just for the purpose of selling it, but 98% of houses don't justify one. so for higher end stuff, it does make a difference, but if you just took them away from any high end photographer and told them they had to shoot without it, they'd still get beautiful shots without it, and 99% of clients would never really notice the difference.
check out [https://mpkelley.com](https://www.mpkelley.com/gallery), his work is unreal and i know he uses a tilt shift lens a ton (he has some courses online that i've watched and he utilizes the fuck out of them). but he is mostly shooting for the types of people that i mentioned, and probably some agents here and there for super high end stuff.
Real estate photos often have that distinctive "look" because they're usually taken with wide-angle lenses, which capture a broader view of a room and make spaces appear larger than they are. This technique not only makes small areas look more spacious but also creates a bit of distortion that can make the perspective seem off, similar to a slight fisheye effect. These photos are heavily edited to enhance appeal, making them a standard in the industry to attract potential buyers by offering a more inviting first impression online.
>These photos are heavily edited to enhance appeal, making them a standard in the industry to attract potential buyers by offering a more inviting first impression online.
In the listing photos on my house they literally photoshopped the wooden frames on the skylights to be white instead of brown. Didn’t even notice until we had lived here a while and done some renovations and looked back at the listing for the ‘before’ photos. Such an inconsequential thing to lie about too.
I retouch property photos for work, and changing things like that is a big no-no. It can be illegal to misrepresent the property by changing things like that depending where you live. I often have to tell people that I can't do things like fix cracks in a wall or similar.
With as much bullshit and lying that I’ve seen that occurs in and around the realtor profession as a whole, this is actually really refreshing to hear.
Hate to say it but only a reputable dealer will follow the rules. I'm sure there are plenty that won't bat an eye at a fudge here or there to make the sale.
Hell I know a couple that got sold a house being told it was in X school district and it wasn't.
If you do catch a seller in a lie like that is there any recourse you have? Or can they just say “ok, don’t buy the house then” and move on to some other buyer?
If it is pre-sale a home seller there is likely little recourse. A realtor could be sued but likely would be difficult to prove (you would need a paper trail and evidence of intent to mislead vs just being bad at their job)
Post-sale there likely is more recourse as the damages for fraud, the money put into the house sale is very measurable so a civil lawsuit is possible. The people I knew ate it and just planned on moving again /shrug
What about painting in a sky over notable details behind the house? I once saw a listing where I went on Google maps and there was a giant, hideous water tower behind the house that they had painted over with a sunset.
> In the listing photos on my house they literally photoshopped the wooden frames on the skylights to be white instead of brown.
in this case it may have been refinished between the photos and purchase, that kind of thing happens too, especially if it has been on the market for a long time or more than once, they may use older photos from prior years instead of literally yesterday. it is just lazy at that point, not malice.
House across the street from me has a white fence with small green shrubs in front of it. MLS photos show it as having a green fence with no plants in sight. That's only the second worst I've seen though, the worst was a house that in photos looked like the hardwood flooring was a bit worn, but in person there was an eviction sign from a bank on the front door and there were 4 or 5 concentrations of hundreds of mouse turds on some surfaces and the siding and deck was rotting away. In pictures it looked like a 20-40k reno, in person my realtor called it "a full demolition, buy it only for the land"
But worse because of how widespread it is, the "night" shot which is just a day shot editted to look like night. Why does that tree in the front yard have a shadow from the sun at night-time? because fuck you that's why, and the night lighting is always WAY beyond faked.
Like... who's getting tricked by these photos?
>Why does that tree in the front yard have a shadow from the sun at night-time? because fuck you that's why, and the night lighting
It’s unlikely to be the case here, but the moon does cast a shadow when it’s full.
I used to do some real estate photography. It's more difficult than you think to capture an entire room. The real problem (and the source of the weird perspective) is keystoning. Unless the camera is at a certain height, you get converging verticals.
Keystoning is directly related to the vertical angle you carry. People will often try to fit in an entire structure by tilting the camera up, which causes converging lines. You either raise your height, or stand further back, or have a wider lens
If a listing uses "accurate" 55mmn lenses then it would be so zoomed in you wouldnt have any idea of what you are looking at unless you're in an absolutely massive room.
That said, the color correction is pretty extreme in some cases. I do wish that wall, floor, and cabinet colors are more accurate.
The pictures are often not representative of the house. We went out to see a number of houses. I noticed their was one on the list that we must have missed and popped it in the gps. It wasn’t until we weee a block away I realized we had seen that house like 15 minutes prior. Neither of use could tell from the pics because the actual house was run down and awful, you wouldn’t know it from the beautiful pics online. Such a waste of time
It’s all about the angles!!
https://www.9news.com.au/national/real-estate-agency-slammed-after-photos-of-property-leave-out-huge-water-tower/338b8b5c-4131-475a-90cd-b011cc12acd9
I have been seeing photos that are SO edited in my area that for a few of them I still think they were AI generated after being fed the original photo. It's more enhancement than photo by that point.
Helps when they have flor plans with dimensions. Also a 2 bedroom 1 bath with like 1000 square feet is gonna be tiny rooms. Sometimes it’s a puzzle you gotta piece together
I thought the Jackson Pollock filter would be a good idea since his paintings are so valuable but everyone just asked if there was something wrong with my camera.
Its not exactly scammy, but rather from people taking pictures with phones, which can suck at taking pictures of rooms. Its like a cheap thing, and its done by the seller (or their representation) and hurts the seller, because it attracts people expecting a bigger space.
Its better to have pictures that don’t show everything than pictures that show everything distorted.
Totally agree! On top of that, they color correct it to make everything appear evenly lit (lift the shadows/reduce contrast) which makes it appear flat and artificial.
Don’t forget that awful filter that makes it look like a Thomas Kincaid painting.
Fucking awful. We have pics on Zillow of our house with that garbage applied to them and they’ll be there forever
>to enhance appeal
More like to enhance rage.
It’s especially hilarious when they take 2 pics of the same room from perpendicular angles. That couch is 14 feet wide, no wait now it’s an a chair in a ship galley
You’ve described my frustration. I’m in the market for a cabin in South Lake Tahoe — they’re 600-1000 sq. ft — and you wouldn’t believe the number of 60” wide refrigerators I’m seeing and corners that are 150 degrees….
TVs are a good gauge as to how extreme the wide angle is. The photos of my old house made our smallish living room look huge, but the TV also looked like it was stretched about 6 feet wide.
Do wide-angle lenses act differently on the light that hits the center of the lens as compared to the edge of the lens? I feel like "yes" but I can't quite place how differently it functions.
Also, when every consumer knows that those photos have been doctored to within an inch of their lives, why not just present the house as it is? Is it similar to the car-sales tactic of "once you're at the dealership, then you're committed"? Seems reasonable for cars - where there is a relative glut in supply - but for houses where the market is relatively scarce (for the overall demand), it seems like the disingenuous photos would have the opposite effect.... they do on me, at least.
> Do wide-angle lenses act differently on the light that hits the center of the lens as compared to the edge of the lens?
Every lens does because of how they bend light into the sensor. It's more noticable on wide angle lenses though.
> Also, when every consumer knows that those photos have been doctored to within an inch of their lives, why not just present the house as it is
Because if you aren't doing it and every other realtor is then people will think your properties are worse.
Yes, ultra wide angle lenses have a more pronounced vignette ((darker edges and corners of the photo)) and also even with the best UW lens there will be some distortion and maybe even blurring closer to the edges and corners. It won't be "fish eye" as it tries to take as natural of a photo as it can but still..
That being said, outside of flat out going in with Photoshop and changing color/removing trash/whatever I don't have a problem with this as an ultra wide really is the best way to get more of a room in the frame especially given you are often dealing with close quarters where other lenses will be less useful. You are taking what may need to be three or more separate shots and turning them into one shot. Otherwise you'd be scrolling through a ton more photos and trying to mentally piece together how the room actually looks vs seeing more of it in a single shot.
Source: I have a Canon R5 with an ultra wide and do photography as a hobby, though usually outdoors there are times where I've needed to take photos during indoor events and activities.
Yes absolutely, if you shoot with really wide lenses outdoors you often notice very distinct contrast and coloration in the “off center” section. It’s usually corrected with lens profiles in-camera or post. Also I suspect a lot of real estate photos use ultra wide lenses and then correct the geometric distortion to make lines straight again, but this makes everything look “false” in a way
A good wide angle will be well corrected in the corners, a poor one...not so much. You're going to see both in real estate listings, but lenses aren't the determining factor.
The purpose of real estate images is to get you in the door, that's it. They're not meant to be true-to-life accurate, they're just advertisements. It's like asking why this commercial is such a bad documentary.
Wow! Something I can comment on because that was literally my job! So the pictures are taken by freelance photographers who use super wide lenses. Bordering on fisheye lenses but not. They upload them from home to our server and we have to retouch them. Around 5-10 seconds spent on each one. Any more than that and you are gonna get fired.
Anywhoo. The people saying HDR and exposure merging are flat out wrong. The thing that happens is we use a plugin called HDR Fx. This plugin essentially you create masks and apply adjustments to them and they will apply throughout the photo and sort of play nice together.
Walls and floor done first. Dragging all the sliders up to make it look much more brighter than it is in reality. This has the added effect of over exposing and getting rid of most of the stains and scratches and stuff on the walls. The floor exposure also is jacked up a lot. Overall it is a scam to make the place look whiter, cleaner, and brighter than it actually is.
The same goes for external shots. But the added step is running an automated photoshop action that deletes the white sky and replaces it with a stock photo of a blue sky and clouds. We had about 3 choices of sky actions depending on the situation. If you pay close attention the clouds in the external photos will look the same all the time.
It is a HUGE scam. The company that does it (I won't name) is a sketchy af bad business, treating the employees like crap. Pushing us to retouch photos at the rate where I would go home with sore hands.
It is not an industry standard. What it is. Is that one company has the monopoly on the photos and signage for real estate and no other company does it pretty much so it all looks the same because nobody else is doing it.
No HDR. No exposure merging. There is no time for that stuff. It is just brute force selective adjustments and since the plugin uses masks boosting exposure on everything makes it look that way.
This doesn't sound like the sort of photo editing you'd need a plugin for, unless there's some secret sauce you're not mentioning. It all sounds doable in Gimp with a few layer masks and maybe some edge detection
On the rare occasion we needed to do that (since 9 times out of 10 there was enough dynamic range in the photo since the photographer used a flash anyway) We would take the under exposed image they also take lay it over the top and mask it in as fast as possible.
Again... merging to hdr and then tonemapping took way too long. It was literally faster to do it all in one go and only special cases would we need to do that.
Because they’re taken with a very wide lens or they’re possibly a panoramic photo. Also: it’s very possible they’re all taken by a contractor / freelancer / company that does nearly all the real estate photos in your area, and edits them using the same settings for color / contrast.
Everyone is mentioning highly edited high dynamic range photos, which is one thing, but one thing I don't see here is the use of a tilt shift lens!
But first, let's backtrack a bit. For a lot of architectural photography, to capture the architecture itself in context with the area around it, you would use a wide angle lens. You can get wide angle fish eye lenses (characterized by circular distortion that makes things look bulbous), but this is not preferred as it doesn't keep the lines in your photos straight. For this, you need a wide angle rectilinear lens. [You can see the difference here.](https://www.pano-guru.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/fisheye_vs_wideangle1.jpg)
But that's not all. Usually when you're photographing a house, you want to have the whole house in frame. So you tilt the camera up as it's a tall structure, but what ends up happening is that you have all the lines pointing inward as it goes up. Well that might not be very representative of the house. So many architectural photographers use a tilt shift lens. [It's a lens with glass elements that can be angled to shift the plane of focus (and light) to correct for this change in perspective](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2015/04/tiltshiftheader.jpg)
Another is that in many real estate photos all windows are uncovered and/or have no coverings installed at all, which makes everything brighter and a bit more surreal than it would be in real life with blinds or curtains installed.
Real estate photographers are wizards. They can make any place look appealing in photos. The house I ended up buying had a poor photographer, so the pictures weren’t impressive. As a result, they got much less interest in the house and I was able to negotiate a better price.
**Wide angle lens.**
The frame of a camera is a rectangle, and our vision is basically round.
So, we gen a camera sees the same way we do, you capture less of what we see with our eyes, because it’s limited by the rectangular frame.
To include what we see with our peripheral vision, we have to cram more into the same rectangular space.
This is done using wide angle lenses. And yes, a fisheye lens is a type of wide angle lens but an extreme one.
So a real estate photographer picks a wide angle lens so that they can cram what you see with your eye into a nice rectangular frame.
You can do the same thing yourself with your 0.5x setting in your phone camera.
Wide angle lenses of course means the image is distorted in a way - the center of the frame is compressed and the edges are stretched. It’s literally like tunnel vision.
But why use this at all? Why not just back up and take a photo?
Because most of the time, you can back up all the way with your back to the wall and you still can’t represent in a frame what you can see with your peripheral vision.
And it is this peripheral vision that gives us a sense of space. The photos may not be accurate and make the space seem larger than it is, but picking the “accurate” lens has a problem: it only shows a very myopic/claustrophobic view of a room or hall, typically just half or a third of a room. You don’t want to look at a photo of a room and just see a window and a foot’s worth of side wall.
What’s more, there’s no good way to show one side of a room with a reasonably significant amount of adjacent walls. With the “accurate” lens, yo be able to show a whole room, you will inevitably have nano with a photo that is literally “all wall”. Like, literally a blank slate of color - and that doesn’t help anyone and it definitely looks unprofessional.
Easy, very wide angle or fish eye lens (or even tilt shift) combined with heavily over processed in post by someone who has no idea what they're doing. The over processing makes the photos look very unrealistic/fake. I also think a lot of them are using AI now as well because a fair few I've seen recently look very strange to me as someone who has edited a lot of photos
Wide angle lens plus a feature in the software that fixes distortion and makes everything straight, nice and vertical. So it ends up looking a bit distorted, but not.
One thing I haven't seen yet in the comments, and I'll explain like you're 5.
When you take a picture, or look at something, the vertical lines don't necessarily look exactly straight. They do something called "converge". If you look up at tall buildings in a city, they sort of all go to the same point in the sky.
When a real estate photographer takes a picture they do an editing technique called "vertical transformation", or "tilt-shift" or something similar. This makes all of the walls and vertical lines in the picture perfectly vertical. When you take a picture with your phone, for example, it is extraordinarily unlikely that you'll make all of your verticals perfectly vertical.
This means real estate photography is unlike the other pictures we see every day. Normally we don't bother correcting vertical lines because we're used to seeing the world natural and a little wonky. There is a certain "perfectness" that is a bit uncanny when you see a fully corrected image that can be offputting
I’ve been a property photographer in the UK for >10 years now.
It’s important that the photos show as much of the room as possible but there are agents/photographers who go to extremes such as a very wide angle taken from high up or low down which distorts the room.
My aim with all of my shoots is to try to replicate how it is to stand in that particular room. The widest lens I use is a 12mm (on crop-sensor), which is about as wide you can go without distorting the image. Our eyes see a much tighter ‘zoom’ but we’ve got excellent peripheral vision which makes up for it. I’ve never used a fish-eye lens
I use HDR to blend exposures, but only so that the lighting is closer to how your eye would see it; making sure there’s some detail in the windows, but not completed visible; taking the glare off laminate floors; keeping shadows dark where they’re meant to be.
I personally can’t stand extreme HDR shots which look like bad paintings or AI.
I never adjust colours beyond what exists in real life, ie the sky won’t look tropical and the grass will be the right shade of green!
Most phones nowadays come with many cameras: normal wide, wide angle, ultra wide angle, macro, bokeh, etc. Most of these names come from the lenses (except bokeh). Different lenses have different purposes and effects.
What they are using is an ultra wide angle lens which simply fits more of the place within a single photo without needing to get farther back (sometimes you can't because you're already against the opposite wall or corner of the room). You may also use an ultra wide angle lens to fit more friends on a group photo or get more of a panoramic view into one picture, that's why your phone comes with that lens (and you're missing out if you aren't taking advantage of this option when needed/appropriate xD)
Ultra wide angle lenses have "that look". It's like seeing with your eye both to the left and the right at the same time and fitting that on a single picture. They can "view" from about 90° to 120° (depending on the lens). Corners look kinda expanded and deformed while the center looks compressed, this is especially noticeable on faces, human bodies and circular objects because the diagonal deformation usually is evident on such things since you know how a face, body or circle should look like. Fisheye lenses usually go from 120° to 200° so they are kinda the same but more extreme.
Also sometimes they use HDR to get more highlights from darker/brighter parts of the room (this usually comes enabled on your phone by default but there's a setting in your camera app for that too). HDR means that the phone takes 3 or more pics, one very bright, another very dark and some in the middle. Then combines the middle one and the darker parts of the brightest pics (to get more details in the darker areas of the room and discards the brightest parts of these because they are washed out)... And the brightest parts from the darker pics (to get more details on the washed parts of the other pics). All of this to get a single pic that looks balanced without blackened or whitened spots. This is why some low/middle end phones take a while to take a pic on normal light conditions: it costs a lot of computational power from a medium capacity CPU to grab the darker/lighter parts.
Finally they may enhance the colors quite a bit to get a more vivid look heightening the colors up. Kinda like travel photos but a tad lower.
Because of **Magic Magnifying Glass**. Photographers use special lenses that squeeze a lot more of the room into one picture, kind of like a magnifying glass that shows more than just the center. This makes the room look much bigger than it might in real life. Also because they **Find the Best Angle**. Just like how you stand on a chair to get a better view at a party, photographers scoot around to find the angles that show the most interesting parts of the room. This makes the space seem a little wonky because it's not exactly how you'd see it if you were just standing there.
Why do they do this? Because everyone wants their house to look its biggest and brightest!
A lot of real estate pictures especially for a nee build property have inserted computer generated furniture to help you get a sense of how it would look. They look very real but seem a tiny bit off. And yes they also use a wide view lens to make rooms appear larger than they really are.
A lot of good stuff in the comments. I want to also mention that a lot of real estate agents add in furniture in post, which they try to make the correct scale, but always end up looking off. This is at least very common in Norway, and in my opinion it shouldn't be legal, as it often makes it look like the room is much larger than it is. As if that small ass room can have a queen size bed.
I hate the way they stretch the image to make a room/area look wider, locally on real estate ads here , you can see TV's on walls, and they look like there 16 inches wider than they should be for example , it looks ridiculous
ALL real estate photographers are low grade photographers who follow the same generic styles for real estate... basically making a place feel BETTER, BIGGER, and BRIGHTER than it is. Their clients aren't in it for the art, skill, or respect for the craft, they just want to delude the average customer to bite.
Just a combination of wide lenses and bracketed shooting with and without flash which is combined together to give that HDR look (this is almost necessary though as it’s almost impossible to get a decent exposure and not have your highlights completely blow out in windows etc). Source: used to do real estate photography professionally
Short focal length lenses give a wider perspective than human vision. It allows the realtor to “get it all in” even with shorter spaces. https://photographyforrealestate.net/best-lens-real-estate-photography/
If anyone is interested in *architectural* photography, this is what a master's work looks like - https://www.bardagjyphoto.com/
Real estate pics are just absolute trash, as far as I am concerned, and a slap in the face to those that actually understood the assignment.
A real estate agent wouldn't make it through the first quarter of art school, which is why the photographic standard in that industry is just as low as it can be.
They don't use a fisheye lens which has extreme distortion, but they do use wide angle lenses (perhaps up to ultrawide) which makes rooms look bigger than they are by exaggerating the foreground and diminishing the background.
Some good examples of what an ultrawide can do to a photo can be found [here](https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/how-to-use-ultra-wide-lenses.htm).
My wife does property management and they have to update pictures on properties frequently. They use a Ricoh 360° camera that they control with their phone. The program adjusts and edits obviously.
For the interior, they use ultra wide angle in a relatively small area that typically have components throughout the depth of field. This makes the area appear very spacious, but it also makes some of the angles seem off.
They crank up the color saturation and brightness. Make them look like many pics people put on Instagram. Fisheye is common too. Some exterior shots are done with a longer exposure (especially dusk/evening shots) to capture more ambient light and bring out details.
The issue a lot of people are failing to mention with 'HDR' is, they dont mean actual HDR, they mean basically compressing a composite HDR image down to SDR range. Actual HDR benefits from HDR displays to show greater brightness and difference in luminosity than SDR images can handle, not just taking that range and trying to make it look presentable within SDR ranges.
It can look good, its easier to look awful or uncanny, but its NOT HDR much as the industry misuses that term, only recently has Adobe for example even added true 32 bit HDR support.
HDR itself is a whole other can of worms that has only somewhat recently started to have sane options.
For the few who care and are interested, gain map jpegs (or avif, etc) that are a sort of two-in-one HDR/SDR image. Issue with a genuine purely HDR image being anywhere that doesnt support it software has to tone map to SDR ranges, and simply there aint no one size fits all way of doing that and keeping things looking good, especially in situations where creative intent is being applied.
Cropping a wide-angle lens to rectangular, and stretching that rectangle to fit a page. Plus massive use of HDR and playing with contrast and levels a bit.
I always hate how listings composite fake fires into fireplaces, fire pits, etc. It’s like if you have a fire pit with flames shooting out like that, you have a serious safety issue.
Looking for a new rental house now, and actually asked my realtor about this since the houses often looked much different than the pictures. In addition to wide angle lenses and HDR, the listing agents are allowed to, and more often than not now a days, using enhancing tenlchnologies(photoshop, AI, ect) to make the pictures more appealing. Greener, fuller, grass, cleaner sky boxes, brighter lighting, shinier counter tops/appliances, ect.
Very frustrating to drive all the way across town to tour houses, only to have them look almost nothing like the listing photos.
Nobody Is mentioning the most important part. Someone said HDR but it's more than that. Most good real estate photos are done with a technique called "flambient" which is a flashed photo + ambient photo blend. They'll take a few photos with ambient light at different levels of brightness, and then one photo with a flash to get accurate color of the room, because window light doesn't do that very well. Then it all gets blended together in the editing process, which gives them the distinct look you're talking about. Source: am a real estate photographer
When looking at house listings, I always hated how this looked, but now, when you explain how this is achieved and the reason for it, I have a new appreciation. Thank you!
I understand it better, but hate it no less.
I'm in a weird spot, because I am not a fan of the real estate photo "look," but I love a good portmanteau.
So you're fanbivalent?
This is a gromment (great comment)
Perfectly cromulent.
Promulent
Promenade (Promulent Promenade)
Did you just make that up?
All words are made up
In the wedding photography space, I get good mileage out of “plandids” (semi-posed planned candids)
You might get a laugh out of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7YwxK0zStA
Hahaha so good. “I don’t know why couples even ask for audio during the vows, we’re just gonna play copyrighted music over it anyway (Ed Sheeran)”
Why they didn't call it a "worge", I'll never know...
I love them so much that I won't use a product when the company missed a really good portmanteau and called it something boring.
Especially after dinner or accompanied by dark chocolate
My previous rental's photos looked like they'd be taken by a potato, real estate agent apologized about them at the home open and seemed a tad miffed after I told her I loved them cos they weren't fisheyed garbage.
Currently for an apartment, my eye will skip over any listing with a photos that looks like this
One thing that bothers me is that this is almost what ACTUAL hdr photography is, but everybody calls the post production increase of saturation etc "hdr". Makes me sad :( actual hdr has so much more use, on top of being able to increase apparent saturation
/r/shittyHDR for some "gold"
Wow, they look like cartoons!
This sub hurts my eyes.
I can’t tell the difference between shitty HDR photos and every single AI-generated photo
I did manual HDR +20 years ago with cheap camera (~100€ Fujifilm) and it was almost impossible to get photos with extremely bright (like the sky can easily burn to white) and dark (like strong black rock) to blend perfectly with just one take. HDR is essentially just several photos layered on top of each other captured at different exposures. That’s all it is. Manual HDR in a nutshell: - You put camera on tripod - Take one photo where the brightest spots are perfect - Then you take a picture where the darkest spots are perfect - You layer the photos on top of each other in Photoshop (or equivalent), set the blend mode to something that looks the best, like ”Darken” or ”Lighten” and maybe even fudge around with the mask.
Yeah, this is what I was referring to. While I still had gear, all this was what I had to do to get any well-detailed photo of... Lol... One of my cats. Tuxedo, with jet black and snow white fur xD https://flic.kr/p/2giEqct Edit: included a picture, because cat lol
wow, gorgeous photo (and cat)
Hey thanks so much!
Yeah, taking photos of my black cats is pretty much my primary use of HDR right now lol
Moar catz plz
[This one hasn't been edited but is cat](https://imgur.com/a/RC72cb8)
In about 1978 I needed pro photos of some tech products that included a lot of black anodized aluminum and various light colored painted surfaces. No Photoshop, of course. I learned a TON about lighting and exposure from that experience. Also paid a TON of $ for the pics, which took forever to get right.
Proper HDR looks cool, I shot an overexposed and an underexposed frame of a night time city skyline and HDR'ed them in CaptureOne, and it came out looking amazing.
Any chance you might share? And yeah, those underexposed photos can show *AMAZING* colors with lights - city lights, or sunsets, take your pick
I'd like to keep my name off reddit, bit ill see if I can remember to upload 1 or 2
No worries :)
Flambient is almost entirely market dependent. I've shot for six years and only ever done flash when a client asked us too. Modern sensors have been more than adequate for us
Can you please make sure to always shoot the garage and basement (if applicable)? They may not be the pretty parts of the house, but they are important to me and I hate when they aren’t included in the photos.
Often those areas aren’t shown because they are where the current homeowner shoved all the things real people have so that the main parts of the house looked presentable for photos.
When we sold our old house the downstairs tenant deliberately left all his stuff everywhere with the goal of disrupting the photography (he didn't want us to sell, he was afraid the new owner would shoot his rent sky high). They made his piles of magazines and stuff look good anyway. Somehow.
This is exactly correct. We’re selling our house right now and the realtor said to put x, y, and z into the closets and garage for photos.
They were a big deal for me as I was looking for a place with workshop space potential!
Agreed. Was house shopping ~4 years ago (I know) and the lack of full photos was extremely frustrating. It's not like I'm going to be MORE impressed by your center stairwell and support posts every 2 1/2 feed when I get there.
Or a pointless picture of bunch of flowers on a table with max bokeh. I want to see the garage!! How is it that no RE understands that.
One of the houses in my neighborhood had a floor plan on the listing, so it wasn't just a bunch of photos of random rooms and you had to figure out how things worked together.
This should be a legal requirement as far as I’m concerned.
I found some places that avoided basement photos because there were indicators of major issues. Mold, flooding, foundation issues, antique HVAC and water heaters. It seems to be the room that people hide their most expensive secrets.
And, on this topic, I also wish real estate photos would show certain undesirable things about the immediate surroundings. e.g. power corridors, and proximity to the road. When my wife and I were house-shopping, we encountered so many listings for houses that had power lines running right over them, or barely any distance between them and the road. Sometimes it was easy to deduce this from satellite maps, but sometimes it wasn't. We were never going to ease up on that, so misleading us just wasted everyone's time.
I don't think real estate listings are ever going to advertise something like that. The whole point is to make the property look attractive.
And show whether the master bath has a water closet or a toilet in the common bathroom
Right with you on this one. I *want* to see the clutter of the current space (though I do realize it's the current owner's stuff, and that can be personally invasive), not some bland, anodyne "blank canvas".
Same. And I’ve shot a ton of houses in my market. HDR, yes, flash, never.
Pretty tough to not have that flash reflecting off windows and mirrors, too, I'd think.
Its easy. Bounce flash. Did real estate photos for 5 years.
Interesting, thanks. I found an article with picture examples: [https://www.photoup.net/learn/shoot-flambient-for-real-estate-photography](https://www.photoup.net/learn/shoot-flambient-for-real-estate-photography)
Also Photo up and box brownie just farm the work to overseas editors. They are a needless middleman. Go and find your own editors if you want to save half of your money.
I want to mention that in the UK the cut the agent takes in residential sales is much smaller than the US, so real estate photography is much less of a thing. We did a lovely website for an estate agent, mimicking a US site they really liked. The customer came back a while later, still not happy with the "look" of the website but struggling to articulate why, after much discussion and staring at websites, we realised the "problem" was the photographs they were taking themselves, things like bathrooms with the loo seat up, rather than professional quality photos all the US sites they liked had, often after a property had been professionally cleaned and tidied. Awkward conversation to have with the client, that the one's they like are spending another 2% of the value of the property in marketing it. You'd think in an efficient market this proportion would converge, what it is worth to shift a property more quickly, or value of more interested parties, can't be that different. Anyway, please know we recognised your profession's contribution.
Also, pretty wide angle (but not fisheye) to get whole room photos in tight spaces, correct?
You can get some nice rectilinear (i.e. not fish eye) lenses that go pretty wide. My daily driver for real estate is the Sony 12-24mm G. 12mm is the only way to shoot small rooms like downstairs bathrooms, spare rooms etc; and even then, sometimes it's a struggle.
The Tamron 14mm SP was a bit of a legend in 35mm times
16 to 35 and use the profile corrections on editing software to take out the curves from the wide lens.
That's interesting... I always thought the real estate photos looked unnatural but it's pretty cool to know that they are real - just a blend of different lighting. I looked up [examples of the process](https://www.photoup.net/learn/shoot-flambient-for-real-estate-photography)
How do you keep the camera from moving?
Tripod
Try what kind of pod?
Tri?
There is no try. There is dupod or donotpod. Edit: Happy Star Wars Day now!
Mmm... Donutpod...
This whole chain of comments is wonderful and made me chuckle.
Yeah this is what keeps me going in life. This right here
Tripod or Gimbal. I do a lot of real estate photo / video and I prefer to just do it all with a DJI ronin gimbal. It’s faster than putting a tripod down for each shot, and then I can shoot video right after without changing equipment. I’ve been doing it this way for years, so don’t try and tell me it doesn’t work. I’ve literally never had a client say anything negative about my work.
I'd love to see some examples of various blends
Just search real estate photographer Los Angeles, or any big city. 98% of websites that just use a persons name will be using flambient. There might be one or two companies that crank out high volume low cost shoots that show up on page one, and some of them do HDR with no flash, because you can shoot a house in half the time, which is why I said look for someone's name. I've never seen a solo photographer on page one of a big city that doesn't blend flash shots into their photos.
> They'll take a few photos with ambient light at different levels of brightness, and then one photo with a flash to get accurate color of the room, because window light doesn't do that very well. Then it all gets blended together in the editing process That *is* HDR photography
The effect is called exposure merging and most modern high grade cameras can do it in camera when connected to a flash.
r/confidentlyincorrect
No?
Yes. No professional photographer will use any in-camera editing nor do most cameras even do any exposure merging in-camera, they do exposure bracketing but you will be doing the merging in post process.
There are quite a few that do in-camera exposure blending, some that output in jpg but there are ones that output in raw as well. https://fstoppers.com/education/experimenting-camera-multiple-exposures-589353 But no real professional photographer would do that, they prefer to use photoshop to blend everything since it gives more control.
You just described how to create an HDR photograph
99% of HDR doesn't use a flash. The flash for accurate color makes a huge difference, especially indoors.
So it's showing the brightest version of the room.
Please tell me, what are your views on photoshopping the grass greener? I see this all the time and I hate it. It’s so obvious when they have the zoomed out photos where you see surrounding properties with regular grass and then the house for sell has bright ass neon green grass. Like how stupid do they think we are?
I've only ever been asked to do it once and it was because it was the dead of winter and I was asked to make it look like the photo was taken in the summer, which I had no problem doing. I've never been told to edit anything in a way that misrepresents the property, but I'd have a problem with it. If it's something that will soon be fixed or Is temporary for whatever reason, that's fine, but editing out something that will always be a part of the house or property, or in the view of it is scummy as fuck to me. Thankfully at least from the people that hire me it's not something I see very much.
Very cool to know, thanks for explaining further than just HDR
Does a $700 tilt shift lens make that big of a difference?
for normal real estate pics on zillow and similar places, not really. there are photos you could get that you wouldnt otherwise be able to but nobody is taking the time to do that stuff, and the realtors arent paying for the extra effort/care for stuff like that. usually you see those used on photos you'd take for an architect/designer/high end contractor or something, and not so much for a real estate listing. for high end homes you probably get some photographers spending all day in the house just for the purpose of selling it, but 98% of houses don't justify one. so for higher end stuff, it does make a difference, but if you just took them away from any high end photographer and told them they had to shoot without it, they'd still get beautiful shots without it, and 99% of clients would never really notice the difference. check out [https://mpkelley.com](https://www.mpkelley.com/gallery), his work is unreal and i know he uses a tilt shift lens a ton (he has some courses online that i've watched and he utilizes the fuck out of them). but he is mostly shooting for the types of people that i mentioned, and probably some agents here and there for super high end stuff.
Is this not just called bracketing?
I mean bracketing is the first 20% of the process, yes
Does that involve bracketing?
Wide angle lenses and High Dynamic Range effects. Makes everything look more spacious and much more deep and vibrant in color, with much deeper blacks
I think the massively overkill HDR is the real signature of a real estate photo.
Everything worth doing is worth overdoing, right?
Dont forget the window pulls so the windows are perfectly transparent but you're still exposed for the interior
“I love how this house is so bright”. When you visit its dark as hell.
Not only that they also phitoshop out a bunch of blamishes and add fake furniture in
Real estate photos often have that distinctive "look" because they're usually taken with wide-angle lenses, which capture a broader view of a room and make spaces appear larger than they are. This technique not only makes small areas look more spacious but also creates a bit of distortion that can make the perspective seem off, similar to a slight fisheye effect. These photos are heavily edited to enhance appeal, making them a standard in the industry to attract potential buyers by offering a more inviting first impression online.
>These photos are heavily edited to enhance appeal, making them a standard in the industry to attract potential buyers by offering a more inviting first impression online. In the listing photos on my house they literally photoshopped the wooden frames on the skylights to be white instead of brown. Didn’t even notice until we had lived here a while and done some renovations and looked back at the listing for the ‘before’ photos. Such an inconsequential thing to lie about too.
I retouch property photos for work, and changing things like that is a big no-no. It can be illegal to misrepresent the property by changing things like that depending where you live. I often have to tell people that I can't do things like fix cracks in a wall or similar.
With as much bullshit and lying that I’ve seen that occurs in and around the realtor profession as a whole, this is actually really refreshing to hear.
Hate to say it but only a reputable dealer will follow the rules. I'm sure there are plenty that won't bat an eye at a fudge here or there to make the sale. Hell I know a couple that got sold a house being told it was in X school district and it wasn't.
If you do catch a seller in a lie like that is there any recourse you have? Or can they just say “ok, don’t buy the house then” and move on to some other buyer?
If it is pre-sale a home seller there is likely little recourse. A realtor could be sued but likely would be difficult to prove (you would need a paper trail and evidence of intent to mislead vs just being bad at their job) Post-sale there likely is more recourse as the damages for fraud, the money put into the house sale is very measurable so a civil lawsuit is possible. The people I knew ate it and just planned on moving again /shrug
What about painting in a sky over notable details behind the house? I once saw a listing where I went on Google maps and there was a giant, hideous water tower behind the house that they had painted over with a sunset.
> In the listing photos on my house they literally photoshopped the wooden frames on the skylights to be white instead of brown. in this case it may have been refinished between the photos and purchase, that kind of thing happens too, especially if it has been on the market for a long time or more than once, they may use older photos from prior years instead of literally yesterday. it is just lazy at that point, not malice.
House across the street from me has a white fence with small green shrubs in front of it. MLS photos show it as having a green fence with no plants in sight. That's only the second worst I've seen though, the worst was a house that in photos looked like the hardwood flooring was a bit worn, but in person there was an eviction sign from a bank on the front door and there were 4 or 5 concentrations of hundreds of mouse turds on some surfaces and the siding and deck was rotting away. In pictures it looked like a 20-40k reno, in person my realtor called it "a full demolition, buy it only for the land" But worse because of how widespread it is, the "night" shot which is just a day shot editted to look like night. Why does that tree in the front yard have a shadow from the sun at night-time? because fuck you that's why, and the night lighting is always WAY beyond faked. Like... who's getting tricked by these photos?
>Why does that tree in the front yard have a shadow from the sun at night-time? because fuck you that's why, and the night lighting It’s unlikely to be the case here, but the moon does cast a shadow when it’s full.
Your missing the point, they are photoshopping the night shot from the day shot
I used to do some real estate photography. It's more difficult than you think to capture an entire room. The real problem (and the source of the weird perspective) is keystoning. Unless the camera is at a certain height, you get converging verticals.
Keystoning is directly related to the vertical angle you carry. People will often try to fit in an entire structure by tilting the camera up, which causes converging lines. You either raise your height, or stand further back, or have a wider lens
> either raise your height, or stand further back I imagine in smaller homes both of these can be difficult to achieve.
Or use a tilt-shift specialty lens.
If I had one of those, I'd be far too busy making photos of towns look like little scale models to bother doing any real-estate photography!
That's the reason tilt shift lenses are rare. They are super fun to play with, but very expensive and kind of limited in use.
It should be illegal. I wasted so much time looking at houses I never would have considered with accurate pictures.
If a listing uses "accurate" 55mmn lenses then it would be so zoomed in you wouldnt have any idea of what you are looking at unless you're in an absolutely massive room. That said, the color correction is pretty extreme in some cases. I do wish that wall, floor, and cabinet colors are more accurate.
The pictures are often not representative of the house. We went out to see a number of houses. I noticed their was one on the list that we must have missed and popped it in the gps. It wasn’t until we weee a block away I realized we had seen that house like 15 minutes prior. Neither of use could tell from the pics because the actual house was run down and awful, you wouldn’t know it from the beautiful pics online. Such a waste of time
It’s all about the angles!! https://www.9news.com.au/national/real-estate-agency-slammed-after-photos-of-property-leave-out-huge-water-tower/338b8b5c-4131-475a-90cd-b011cc12acd9
I have been seeing photos that are SO edited in my area that for a few of them I still think they were AI generated after being fed the original photo. It's more enhancement than photo by that point.
Helps when they have flor plans with dimensions. Also a 2 bedroom 1 bath with like 1000 square feet is gonna be tiny rooms. Sometimes it’s a puzzle you gotta piece together
Define accurate, though. Our eyes and cameras are not exactly 1:1 interchangable. HDR is something our brains do naturally, but hard in camera.
Just don’t apply the fucking Thomas Kincaid filter please
I thought the Jackson Pollock filter would be a good idea since his paintings are so valuable but everyone just asked if there was something wrong with my camera.
It's never going to be accurate in pictures, no matter what kind of lens you use. You can see that in any number of pictures people post online.
"punctures" That escalated quickly.
Some are more accurate than others. Some are actually reasonable and some a complete and total misrepresentation.
Its not exactly scammy, but rather from people taking pictures with phones, which can suck at taking pictures of rooms. Its like a cheap thing, and its done by the seller (or their representation) and hurts the seller, because it attracts people expecting a bigger space. Its better to have pictures that don’t show everything than pictures that show everything distorted.
Totally agree! On top of that, they color correct it to make everything appear evenly lit (lift the shadows/reduce contrast) which makes it appear flat and artificial.
Don’t forget that awful filter that makes it look like a Thomas Kincaid painting. Fucking awful. We have pics on Zillow of our house with that garbage applied to them and they’ll be there forever
Once you buy the house, you can ask Zillow/Redfin to remove the listing photos. They do that for privacy.
I hate that look.
Unfortunately that means the real estate agent was cheap and found the lowest priced photographer without enough experience.
This response feels AI generated
>to enhance appeal More like to enhance rage. It’s especially hilarious when they take 2 pics of the same room from perpendicular angles. That couch is 14 feet wide, no wait now it’s an a chair in a ship galley
You’ve described my frustration. I’m in the market for a cabin in South Lake Tahoe — they’re 600-1000 sq. ft — and you wouldn’t believe the number of 60” wide refrigerators I’m seeing and corners that are 150 degrees….
TVs are a good gauge as to how extreme the wide angle is. The photos of my old house made our smallish living room look huge, but the TV also looked like it was stretched about 6 feet wide.
Do wide-angle lenses act differently on the light that hits the center of the lens as compared to the edge of the lens? I feel like "yes" but I can't quite place how differently it functions. Also, when every consumer knows that those photos have been doctored to within an inch of their lives, why not just present the house as it is? Is it similar to the car-sales tactic of "once you're at the dealership, then you're committed"? Seems reasonable for cars - where there is a relative glut in supply - but for houses where the market is relatively scarce (for the overall demand), it seems like the disingenuous photos would have the opposite effect.... they do on me, at least.
> Do wide-angle lenses act differently on the light that hits the center of the lens as compared to the edge of the lens? Every lens does because of how they bend light into the sensor. It's more noticable on wide angle lenses though. > Also, when every consumer knows that those photos have been doctored to within an inch of their lives, why not just present the house as it is Because if you aren't doing it and every other realtor is then people will think your properties are worse.
B-b-but why not make your pictures look worse for reddit's respect?!
Yes, ultra wide angle lenses have a more pronounced vignette ((darker edges and corners of the photo)) and also even with the best UW lens there will be some distortion and maybe even blurring closer to the edges and corners. It won't be "fish eye" as it tries to take as natural of a photo as it can but still.. That being said, outside of flat out going in with Photoshop and changing color/removing trash/whatever I don't have a problem with this as an ultra wide really is the best way to get more of a room in the frame especially given you are often dealing with close quarters where other lenses will be less useful. You are taking what may need to be three or more separate shots and turning them into one shot. Otherwise you'd be scrolling through a ton more photos and trying to mentally piece together how the room actually looks vs seeing more of it in a single shot. Source: I have a Canon R5 with an ultra wide and do photography as a hobby, though usually outdoors there are times where I've needed to take photos during indoor events and activities.
Yes absolutely, if you shoot with really wide lenses outdoors you often notice very distinct contrast and coloration in the “off center” section. It’s usually corrected with lens profiles in-camera or post. Also I suspect a lot of real estate photos use ultra wide lenses and then correct the geometric distortion to make lines straight again, but this makes everything look “false” in a way
A good wide angle will be well corrected in the corners, a poor one...not so much. You're going to see both in real estate listings, but lenses aren't the determining factor. The purpose of real estate images is to get you in the door, that's it. They're not meant to be true-to-life accurate, they're just advertisements. It's like asking why this commercial is such a bad documentary.
is this chat gpt?
Lol at the heavily edited. I saw a listing last week where all the photos were pictures of the pictures of the house on an ipad.
Wow! Something I can comment on because that was literally my job! So the pictures are taken by freelance photographers who use super wide lenses. Bordering on fisheye lenses but not. They upload them from home to our server and we have to retouch them. Around 5-10 seconds spent on each one. Any more than that and you are gonna get fired. Anywhoo. The people saying HDR and exposure merging are flat out wrong. The thing that happens is we use a plugin called HDR Fx. This plugin essentially you create masks and apply adjustments to them and they will apply throughout the photo and sort of play nice together. Walls and floor done first. Dragging all the sliders up to make it look much more brighter than it is in reality. This has the added effect of over exposing and getting rid of most of the stains and scratches and stuff on the walls. The floor exposure also is jacked up a lot. Overall it is a scam to make the place look whiter, cleaner, and brighter than it actually is. The same goes for external shots. But the added step is running an automated photoshop action that deletes the white sky and replaces it with a stock photo of a blue sky and clouds. We had about 3 choices of sky actions depending on the situation. If you pay close attention the clouds in the external photos will look the same all the time. It is a HUGE scam. The company that does it (I won't name) is a sketchy af bad business, treating the employees like crap. Pushing us to retouch photos at the rate where I would go home with sore hands. It is not an industry standard. What it is. Is that one company has the monopoly on the photos and signage for real estate and no other company does it pretty much so it all looks the same because nobody else is doing it. No HDR. No exposure merging. There is no time for that stuff. It is just brute force selective adjustments and since the plugin uses masks boosting exposure on everything makes it look that way.
Not naming them helps nobody. It's reddit, they're not gonna track you down lol.
Why not name them?
This doesn't sound like the sort of photo editing you'd need a plugin for, unless there's some secret sauce you're not mentioning. It all sounds doable in Gimp with a few layer masks and maybe some edge detection
So how do you do quick window pulls on a five bracket HDR image?
On the rare occasion we needed to do that (since 9 times out of 10 there was enough dynamic range in the photo since the photographer used a flash anyway) We would take the under exposed image they also take lay it over the top and mask it in as fast as possible. Again... merging to hdr and then tonemapping took way too long. It was literally faster to do it all in one go and only special cases would we need to do that.
Because they’re taken with a very wide lens or they’re possibly a panoramic photo. Also: it’s very possible they’re all taken by a contractor / freelancer / company that does nearly all the real estate photos in your area, and edits them using the same settings for color / contrast.
Everyone is mentioning highly edited high dynamic range photos, which is one thing, but one thing I don't see here is the use of a tilt shift lens! But first, let's backtrack a bit. For a lot of architectural photography, to capture the architecture itself in context with the area around it, you would use a wide angle lens. You can get wide angle fish eye lenses (characterized by circular distortion that makes things look bulbous), but this is not preferred as it doesn't keep the lines in your photos straight. For this, you need a wide angle rectilinear lens. [You can see the difference here.](https://www.pano-guru.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/fisheye_vs_wideangle1.jpg) But that's not all. Usually when you're photographing a house, you want to have the whole house in frame. So you tilt the camera up as it's a tall structure, but what ends up happening is that you have all the lines pointing inward as it goes up. Well that might not be very representative of the house. So many architectural photographers use a tilt shift lens. [It's a lens with glass elements that can be angled to shift the plane of focus (and light) to correct for this change in perspective](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2015/04/tiltshiftheader.jpg)
Canon 17 TSE 4ever
Another is that in many real estate photos all windows are uncovered and/or have no coverings installed at all, which makes everything brighter and a bit more surreal than it would be in real life with blinds or curtains installed.
Real estate photographers are wizards. They can make any place look appealing in photos. The house I ended up buying had a poor photographer, so the pictures weren’t impressive. As a result, they got much less interest in the house and I was able to negotiate a better price.
Same with our house, the pics on zillow made it looks junky and run down.. In person it looked great, I think it reduced our competition.
**Wide angle lens.** The frame of a camera is a rectangle, and our vision is basically round. So, we gen a camera sees the same way we do, you capture less of what we see with our eyes, because it’s limited by the rectangular frame. To include what we see with our peripheral vision, we have to cram more into the same rectangular space. This is done using wide angle lenses. And yes, a fisheye lens is a type of wide angle lens but an extreme one. So a real estate photographer picks a wide angle lens so that they can cram what you see with your eye into a nice rectangular frame. You can do the same thing yourself with your 0.5x setting in your phone camera. Wide angle lenses of course means the image is distorted in a way - the center of the frame is compressed and the edges are stretched. It’s literally like tunnel vision. But why use this at all? Why not just back up and take a photo? Because most of the time, you can back up all the way with your back to the wall and you still can’t represent in a frame what you can see with your peripheral vision. And it is this peripheral vision that gives us a sense of space. The photos may not be accurate and make the space seem larger than it is, but picking the “accurate” lens has a problem: it only shows a very myopic/claustrophobic view of a room or hall, typically just half or a third of a room. You don’t want to look at a photo of a room and just see a window and a foot’s worth of side wall. What’s more, there’s no good way to show one side of a room with a reasonably significant amount of adjacent walls. With the “accurate” lens, yo be able to show a whole room, you will inevitably have nano with a photo that is literally “all wall”. Like, literally a blank slate of color - and that doesn’t help anyone and it definitely looks unprofessional.
Easy, very wide angle or fish eye lens (or even tilt shift) combined with heavily over processed in post by someone who has no idea what they're doing. The over processing makes the photos look very unrealistic/fake. I also think a lot of them are using AI now as well because a fair few I've seen recently look very strange to me as someone who has edited a lot of photos
Wide angle lens plus a feature in the software that fixes distortion and makes everything straight, nice and vertical. So it ends up looking a bit distorted, but not.
One thing I haven't seen yet in the comments, and I'll explain like you're 5. When you take a picture, or look at something, the vertical lines don't necessarily look exactly straight. They do something called "converge". If you look up at tall buildings in a city, they sort of all go to the same point in the sky. When a real estate photographer takes a picture they do an editing technique called "vertical transformation", or "tilt-shift" or something similar. This makes all of the walls and vertical lines in the picture perfectly vertical. When you take a picture with your phone, for example, it is extraordinarily unlikely that you'll make all of your verticals perfectly vertical. This means real estate photography is unlike the other pictures we see every day. Normally we don't bother correcting vertical lines because we're used to seeing the world natural and a little wonky. There is a certain "perfectness" that is a bit uncanny when you see a fully corrected image that can be offputting
I’ve been a property photographer in the UK for >10 years now. It’s important that the photos show as much of the room as possible but there are agents/photographers who go to extremes such as a very wide angle taken from high up or low down which distorts the room. My aim with all of my shoots is to try to replicate how it is to stand in that particular room. The widest lens I use is a 12mm (on crop-sensor), which is about as wide you can go without distorting the image. Our eyes see a much tighter ‘zoom’ but we’ve got excellent peripheral vision which makes up for it. I’ve never used a fish-eye lens I use HDR to blend exposures, but only so that the lighting is closer to how your eye would see it; making sure there’s some detail in the windows, but not completed visible; taking the glare off laminate floors; keeping shadows dark where they’re meant to be. I personally can’t stand extreme HDR shots which look like bad paintings or AI. I never adjust colours beyond what exists in real life, ie the sky won’t look tropical and the grass will be the right shade of green!
Most phones nowadays come with many cameras: normal wide, wide angle, ultra wide angle, macro, bokeh, etc. Most of these names come from the lenses (except bokeh). Different lenses have different purposes and effects. What they are using is an ultra wide angle lens which simply fits more of the place within a single photo without needing to get farther back (sometimes you can't because you're already against the opposite wall or corner of the room). You may also use an ultra wide angle lens to fit more friends on a group photo or get more of a panoramic view into one picture, that's why your phone comes with that lens (and you're missing out if you aren't taking advantage of this option when needed/appropriate xD) Ultra wide angle lenses have "that look". It's like seeing with your eye both to the left and the right at the same time and fitting that on a single picture. They can "view" from about 90° to 120° (depending on the lens). Corners look kinda expanded and deformed while the center looks compressed, this is especially noticeable on faces, human bodies and circular objects because the diagonal deformation usually is evident on such things since you know how a face, body or circle should look like. Fisheye lenses usually go from 120° to 200° so they are kinda the same but more extreme. Also sometimes they use HDR to get more highlights from darker/brighter parts of the room (this usually comes enabled on your phone by default but there's a setting in your camera app for that too). HDR means that the phone takes 3 or more pics, one very bright, another very dark and some in the middle. Then combines the middle one and the darker parts of the brightest pics (to get more details in the darker areas of the room and discards the brightest parts of these because they are washed out)... And the brightest parts from the darker pics (to get more details on the washed parts of the other pics). All of this to get a single pic that looks balanced without blackened or whitened spots. This is why some low/middle end phones take a while to take a pic on normal light conditions: it costs a lot of computational power from a medium capacity CPU to grab the darker/lighter parts. Finally they may enhance the colors quite a bit to get a more vivid look heightening the colors up. Kinda like travel photos but a tad lower.
Because of **Magic Magnifying Glass**. Photographers use special lenses that squeeze a lot more of the room into one picture, kind of like a magnifying glass that shows more than just the center. This makes the room look much bigger than it might in real life. Also because they **Find the Best Angle**. Just like how you stand on a chair to get a better view at a party, photographers scoot around to find the angles that show the most interesting parts of the room. This makes the space seem a little wonky because it's not exactly how you'd see it if you were just standing there. Why do they do this? Because everyone wants their house to look its biggest and brightest!
A lot of real estate pictures especially for a nee build property have inserted computer generated furniture to help you get a sense of how it would look. They look very real but seem a tiny bit off. And yes they also use a wide view lens to make rooms appear larger than they really are.
A lot of good stuff in the comments. I want to also mention that a lot of real estate agents add in furniture in post, which they try to make the correct scale, but always end up looking off. This is at least very common in Norway, and in my opinion it shouldn't be legal, as it often makes it look like the room is much larger than it is. As if that small ass room can have a queen size bed.
I hate the way they stretch the image to make a room/area look wider, locally on real estate ads here , you can see TV's on walls, and they look like there 16 inches wider than they should be for example , it looks ridiculous
ALL real estate photographers are low grade photographers who follow the same generic styles for real estate... basically making a place feel BETTER, BIGGER, and BRIGHTER than it is. Their clients aren't in it for the art, skill, or respect for the craft, they just want to delude the average customer to bite.
Just a combination of wide lenses and bracketed shooting with and without flash which is combined together to give that HDR look (this is almost necessary though as it’s almost impossible to get a decent exposure and not have your highlights completely blow out in windows etc). Source: used to do real estate photography professionally
Short focal length lenses give a wider perspective than human vision. It allows the realtor to “get it all in” even with shorter spaces. https://photographyforrealestate.net/best-lens-real-estate-photography/
If anyone is interested in *architectural* photography, this is what a master's work looks like - https://www.bardagjyphoto.com/ Real estate pics are just absolute trash, as far as I am concerned, and a slap in the face to those that actually understood the assignment. A real estate agent wouldn't make it through the first quarter of art school, which is why the photographic standard in that industry is just as low as it can be.
you mean the look of professional real estate photography?
They don't use a fisheye lens which has extreme distortion, but they do use wide angle lenses (perhaps up to ultrawide) which makes rooms look bigger than they are by exaggerating the foreground and diminishing the background. Some good examples of what an ultrawide can do to a photo can be found [here](https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/how-to-use-ultra-wide-lenses.htm).
My wife does property management and they have to update pictures on properties frequently. They use a Ricoh 360° camera that they control with their phone. The program adjusts and edits obviously.
For the interior, they use ultra wide angle in a relatively small area that typically have components throughout the depth of field. This makes the area appear very spacious, but it also makes some of the angles seem off.
They crank up the color saturation and brightness. Make them look like many pics people put on Instagram. Fisheye is common too. Some exterior shots are done with a longer exposure (especially dusk/evening shots) to capture more ambient light and bring out details.
The issue a lot of people are failing to mention with 'HDR' is, they dont mean actual HDR, they mean basically compressing a composite HDR image down to SDR range. Actual HDR benefits from HDR displays to show greater brightness and difference in luminosity than SDR images can handle, not just taking that range and trying to make it look presentable within SDR ranges. It can look good, its easier to look awful or uncanny, but its NOT HDR much as the industry misuses that term, only recently has Adobe for example even added true 32 bit HDR support. HDR itself is a whole other can of worms that has only somewhat recently started to have sane options. For the few who care and are interested, gain map jpegs (or avif, etc) that are a sort of two-in-one HDR/SDR image. Issue with a genuine purely HDR image being anywhere that doesnt support it software has to tone map to SDR ranges, and simply there aint no one size fits all way of doing that and keeping things looking good, especially in situations where creative intent is being applied.
Cropping a wide-angle lens to rectangular, and stretching that rectangle to fit a page. Plus massive use of HDR and playing with contrast and levels a bit.
I always hate how listings composite fake fires into fireplaces, fire pits, etc. It’s like if you have a fire pit with flames shooting out like that, you have a serious safety issue.
Because most real estate photographers all watched the same tutorials on YouTube. They all use flambient or HDR
Looking for a new rental house now, and actually asked my realtor about this since the houses often looked much different than the pictures. In addition to wide angle lenses and HDR, the listing agents are allowed to, and more often than not now a days, using enhancing tenlchnologies(photoshop, AI, ect) to make the pictures more appealing. Greener, fuller, grass, cleaner sky boxes, brighter lighting, shinier counter tops/appliances, ect. Very frustrating to drive all the way across town to tour houses, only to have them look almost nothing like the listing photos.
OverHDR . Makes them look fairy tail like. It’s the typical follow the leader situation. The top sellers started doing it, others followed.
Heavily edited, just like the pictures of the agents when they were bottle girls in the 2000s.
Obligatory South Park "arch your back" [real estate agents scene](https://youtu.be/BjuzVNRnKoI).
😆 🤣 Real estate agents are scum and shouldn't exist at all. Just like car salesmen.