1) Charge by the property, room, or sq/ft – NOT hourly.

Real estate photography is a very different business from something like wedding or event photography, where “hours of coverage” are a common thing.
When it comes to real estate clients, they will want to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. If your pricing is by the hour, yet your pace of work seems at all slow to them (even if you’re just taking the necessary time to get truly polished results!), some clients will feel like you’re milking them for more money.

Instead, first make sure that you always work with consistent efficiency, even if you have to take an extra few minutes to get a shot right. Then, once you know how many hours certain jobs will take, convert your desired hourly rate into a more straightforward price, and charge by the property and/or by the image.  You’ll make roughly the same amount of money, and your clients will perceive the pricing to be much more straightforward and fair.

2) Do the math on what you’re actually paying yourself.

Alright, this tip is one that some creative people won’t want to hear, but it’s absolutely critical. So please don’t skip this just because the word “math” made the artist in you panic! Read on…

Tally up all the hours you spend not just shooting and post-producing, but also corresponding with a client, drafting up their contract, driving, even prepping your gear, cleaning your lenses, charging your batteries. It’s ALL part of your overhead time and costs!

If you can do this for all your work hours, and then organize it by job, you’ll discover that maybe for example it takes you 8-10 hours of behind-the-scenes work to deliver a job that “only” took 1-2 hours to shoot. Then, you can factor this info into your overall pricing for that size of a job to ensure that you’re profitable.

In accounting, this is called the “cost method” of pricing.  Below is a sample screenshot of what this might look like.

Before we move on, another important bit of math to do is this: how many clients you can actually handle in a given day or week, and what that could add up to? This will be what actually tells you if the business model is truly profitable enough, or if you need to raise your real estate photography pricing. In other words, just because you turned a profit on one job, doesn’t mean you can go full-time and make a career out of it. The weekly/monthly numbers have to add up, too.

3) Always Seek Improvement in Efficiency

Since revenue per client is typically in the hundreds and not the thousands, a profitable real estate photography business, perhaps more so than any other genre of photography, requires an efficient workflow.

Quick turnaround time and attention to detail can be the difference between a client who keeps using you, and one who never calls again. If you promise images in a certain time frame but can’t deliver on schedule, you’re in a lot worse trouble than if the subtle tones or colors of your post-production are slightly off.

Moreover, if you’re taking too long with any aspect of the workflow, you can quickly find yourself making significantly less per hour than you’d like.

Keep efficiency in mind and seek ways to cut time without compromising quality.  For example, many real estate jobs can require you to perform the same bracketed HDR merge repeatedly, and the best way to do that is with an application such as Photomatix Pro.

4) Analyze The Competition

To determine what you should charge, first you should understand where you are in relation to the market and your competitors.  This can be done with a quick “SWOT” analysis, as outlined below:

• Strengths – Create a list of your strengths.  What do you do better than your competition?  Do you have resources or knowledge that your competitors don’t?
• Weaknesses – Next, make a list out all of your weaknesses.  Where can you improve?  What are your competitors doing better than you (currently)?
• Opportunities – List the opportunities in the current environment.  Are there population or demographic changes in your area?  Is there a shift in style preferences?
• Threats – List the external threats to your business in the current environment. Is there more competition?  Are the barriers to entry low, possibly allowing more competition in the future?

After you’ve analyzed your own business, choose a handful of competitors in your area and make a list of their strengths and weaknesses.  In addition, document their real estate photography pricing if it’s available.  Real Estate Photography businesses are often very transparent in their pricing.  In fact, many photographers have their prices and packages right on their websites.

If you feel that you are offering a service, product, and experience at or above your competition, consider matching or pricing above them.  If you feel like your weaknesses outweigh your strengths in comparison, consider pricing at below.

This is not an exact science, however, as each individual has different opportunity costs and income expectations. That being said, this analysis—along with the Cost Method outlined in Tip 2—give you an idea of the range in which you should fall.

5) Understand the Psychology of Pricing

This is another real estate photography pricing 101 tip that every small business owner should understand. You should expect that most of your clients will go for one of your middle packages if you offer three main “packages” or products.

Your bottom package should be the minimum amount you would charge and still be motivated to complete the job and profitable after doing so.  The top package should be the VIP experience with the potential to capture high-end clients with a high budget.

These packages should lead the client into booking the middle package, which should include everything your average client would want and need at a price point within your target market’s budgets.

While you shouldn’t expect every single client to jump at your highest-priced package, it isn’t a good sign if every single client is just barely affording your lowest package. (By the way, if every client is booking your most expensive package, that means you really should consider raising your prices!)

For many photographers, this can require a lot of fine-tuning in order to get it right, so don’t be afraid to adjust over time.

6) Know the Value of Properties in Your Target Market

It would be great if real estate photography pricing could be an exact percentage of the value of the property itself, but unfortunately, that’s not the case.  Still, it’s easy to understand that you can charge more for real estate photography in areas where the property itself is worth a lot more.

If you’ve been doing work in one area where all the properties are roughly in one price range, but you get contacted to shoot a property in a different area where most homes cost ten times as much, you should consider adjusting your prices for the new area.  Of course, you don’t want to seem opportunistic, so your old pricing needs to be unknown to your new clients and/or you need to be able to justify the higher pricing if questioned.

This might result in a few “no thank you’s” from some potential clients, but it can eventually open the door to a whole new price bracket and clientele.

7) Offer Additional Services

As any internet marketing guru will tell you, countless business models these days rely on selling additional services or products above the “in-the-door” price.  Real estate photography is no different. Of course, no customer likes that “upsell” feeling, so make sure you are adding value with everything you offer.  Also, keep it simple, quick, and low-pressure.

A few additional services that some real-estate photography clients might be interested in are:

• Ariel/Drone Photography – Whether this is an essential service or an add on these days is up for debate.
  
• Videography Services – Consider partnering with another business to offer this service if this is beyond your core skillset.
• Rush Turnaround Real Estate Photography Pricing – Even if most clients are OK with you delivering images in 48-72 hours, a few clients here and there may ask you to turnaround images in just 12-24 hours; you can either choose to swallow that cost (no shame in that, by the way) or offer such an immediate turn-around at an additional charge.
• On-Location Proofing/Delivery (Shooting Tethered, Etc.) – Quick turnaround is one thing; some high-end clients may even prefer that you proof the images on-site for them so that they can approve of each shot before you even leave the job. This may require you to shoot tethered to a laptop, and get the images into Lightroom or even do advanced processing immediately, all being services which are certainly worth an added fee.
• Different Shoots at Different Times of Day – Consider offering premium packages that offer photographs at different times of the day.  Some clients may want a sunset/twilight shoot, while others may be fine with a mid-day job.
  However, this idea deserves its own discussion, which we’ll begin below.

8) Remember – There’s Only One Sunset and Twilight Each Day

This may sound like a really odd thing to say among tips about pricing real estate photography, but hear me out. Simply put, exterior shots are gorgeous at twilight. And, unless you (and your client) are willing to wake up for sunrise, you’ll only be able to fit one property into a single day, usually.

So, some real estate photographers recommend charging a higher price if a client requests a twilight shot for their exterior, while other real estate photographers don’t. What works for you may be one or the other. If all your clients request that a property exterior is shot at sunset, you should just count it in your initial price. However, if more than half your clients don’t care if you photograph an exterior mid-day, then you have room to decide on what works best for your business.

The important thing to remember is that the “golden hour” and “blue hour” time of day does have value. Maybe you have to to do a lot of horrible rush-hour driving, just to shoot a property right around sunset, so you could consider having an added fee for travel and timing, even if it’s just a small fee.

9) Don’t Sell Yourself Short or Under-Charge Just to Gain Access to a Property

This is one common mistake you might make after you’ve photographed a handful of properties, and you get an inquiry about photographing a really nice portfolio-worthy property.  Don’t make the mistake of selling yourself short just to ensure that you get the job!  Or, at the very least, don’t do this more than a few times in your career.

If you find yourself doing a cheap job or even a “freebie” just because you want to photograph a really nice property, then you may need a reality check.  Simply put, if you’re a good enough photographer that a client is even considering letting you photograph a really high-end property, then you’re worth good money, and you should be charging it.  Have confidence in your work and your value.

Charging a fee shows the client that, regardless of your skill level, your time is still valuable, and you should be respected as a fellow professional. To clients, shooting for free can bring with it the stigma that you are just a hobbyist who is desperate to make a few bucks sooner or later (and the client is happy with letting it be “later”).

10) Be Careful with Volume Discounts

For those of you who are just barely starting out, and are considering doing your first job for free or a low fee, be sure that you’re only offering this “introductory real estate photography pricing” for one or two properties at most.  However, avoid committing to multiple properties at a discount. Simply put, if you’re new to the business, you might vastly underestimate how much time it takes you to complete each project.  This will only lead to major frustrations when you wind up making less than minimum wage, and also if the client doesn’t receive their photos in a timely manner.

If at all possible, only offer a volume discount to clients you’ve worked with already; you know their standards, or rather, how picky they are, as well as how much time goes into each job. Even then, a volume discount should be just a relatively small percentage. And remember, don’t even mention any sort of discounts, unless a client brings it up and persists in discussing it.

Bonus Tip! Set a business goal, and hold yourself to it

This final tip is the hardest for many entrepreneurial small business owners to tackle. That is, setting a specific goal and holding yourself to it.

Say, for example, you want your average job to be at $700 within 1 or 2 years, or you want to be grossing $80K per year, by the end of year 1 or 2. Well, how are you going to get there? It’s one thing to set a goal, but it’s an entirely different thing to come up with a plan, a course of action.

So, set small steps for yourself to take, each month or each quarter, with regards to your real estate photography pricing, or your overhead costs and actual profits, or simply your sheer volume of clients. Work towards those smaller targets each week, each month, and see where you stand at the end of the week/month.

If you reach your goal early, you can either set a higher goal next, or you can accelerate your existing plan. However, if you don’t meet your goal, you guessed it – you need to reevaluate your strategy and potentially extend your timetable for the existing goal.

It can be really hard to hold yourself to these goals and adjust course accordingly, but any hard decision you make sooner, is much, much better than realizing you’re 6-12 months down the road and have almost nothing to show for it.

Again, this is just general business advice for all entrepreneurs, but it’s extremely relevant to the start of any photography business, and absolutely pertinent to this particular topic of setting your pricing as a real estate photographer.

Questions or comments?

We hope this article has helped you find the confidence to move forward with a real estate photography business! Please leave comments below if you have any specific questions about pricing for real estate photography.

Well, it certainly doesn’t have to be so intimidating! In fact, adding flash to real estate photos in particular is very simple and easy, because of the nature of your subject: mostly static scenes and rooms that you can work with at your leisure.

A big thank-you to HDRsoft for sponsoring this content! We’re proud to be sharing our own professional advice with you on this subject, and the advice given (from gear/software used to shooting techniques) is our own real-world experience.

In this tutorial, we’ll teach you how to work quickly and effectively with flash to get beautiful results that a real estate agent with a cell phone can’t capture by themselves!

Real Estate Photography | Shooting Technique Overview

Before we conclude this 5-part series, let’s introduce this final (and yes, most complex) shooting technique by going over all of the ways you could possibly photograph a real estate interior or exterior:

Single Exposure (Nice when it’s possible, but often simply not going to happen!)

HDR Bracketed Exposures (A very common way to photograph many interiors and exteriors)

Single Exposure With Flash (A quick, basic, easy way to add light to a room)

Multiple Exposures With Flash (Good for when you need to Illuminate multiple subjects, or place the flash within the image composition)

HDR Bracketed Exposures With Flash (The ultimate way to control all light and contrast in any environment!)

In our previous tutorial, we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of both HDR and flash photography for real estate work. To sum up from that tutorial, both methods play an important role in being a good professional real estate photographer, so you should definitely learn both! Sometimes an HDR is absolutely essential to capture your scene, while other times using flash is the perfect way to photograph an interior or exterior.

Yes, that’s an 11-EV Bracket! 1-EV increments were used to create this HDR)

Merging the images together in Photomatix Pro using the “Fusion/Interior” setting

In this article, of course, we’ll focus on using flash, aka strobe lighting, in real estate photography. That is, until we use both flash and HDR at the same time! Don’t worry, though, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. So, let’s jump right in!

How To Photograph Real Estate With Flash

Okay, let’s talk about how to use flash in real estate photography!

The quickest, most affordable, and least intimidating way to add light  to a room or property is to get a single flash in your kit, and hand-hold it wirelessly or use a simple light stand.

Real Estate Lighting | Quick Gear Guide

• Hotshoe Flash Recommendations: Nikon SB series, Canon EX series, Yongnuo, Godox, or Neewer flashes (All have built-in radio triggering)
• Strobe Flash Recommendations: Profoto, Godox, or Flashpoint strobes (All have built-in radio triggering)
• Light Stand Recommendations: Manfrotto “Nano” 5001B Light Stand, Cheetah Stand C8

A hotshoe strobe may be enough for some people, who are willing to shoot with a slightly higher ISO and/or a wider/brighter aperture, however you may want to add a slightly more powerful strobe if you’d rather always be able to shoot at your lowest ISO and a relatively small aperture.

Having a more powerful flash will also help with bouncing off extremely high ceilings, or illuminating large portions of a property exterior at sunset.

Method 1.)  Single Exposures with Flash/Strobe

Single exposure, f/4, 1/50 sec, ISO 100, 2x hotshoe flashes fired at the left-hand ceiling/wall

If the ambient light just isn’t very flattering to certain shadowy subjects, even when exposed brightly with bracketing, then you may need to add some of your own light to the scene and illuminate that subject.

Adding light to a scene allows you to control the direction and quality of light on key subjects in any scene. For example, if a particular table or chair falls into deep shadow, then adding some light directly to that subject will help emphasize it correctly and create a well-balanced image.

So, how do you control the direction and quality of the light? Before you start wildly blasting your flash at things and getting all kinds of blown-out or harsh shadowed images, let’s consider the possible methods:

A. Direct Flash

Note how the shadow is harder or softer depending on where it is positioned and aimed

Direct, bare-bulb flash/strobe can work, but it will usually cause very harsh shadows and bright spots that make an image look even worse than natural light.

Don’t be discouraged, though; you might not need to go out and buy lots of fancy light modifiers or other equipment! Just practice finding the best angle possible to minimize hard shadows, or, even better, try bouncing the flash off the ceiling…

B. Bare Flash Bounced Off The Ceiling

Bouncing the flash off the ceiling of a room is a great way to quickly fill a large portion of the room with soft, even light. That is, of course, only as long as the ceiling itself isn’t in the frame of your shot! Then you’ll wind up with a blown-out white spot on the ceiling in your image.

Also, this only works if the ceiling is a relatively neutral color. Bouncing just won’t work very well if you have dark wood ceilings or any painted color different from neutral grey/white. So, always look for white or near-white ceilings and/or walls.

You might even get in the habit of asking your clients if they know what color (and how high) the ceilings are in the properties they’re about to hire you to photograph.

Generally, I start by bouncing my flash off the ceiling just above and to the right or left of my camera position, to see how the lighting looks like on my main subject.

Then, I either brighten or darken the flash to get the illumination perfect, and if the direction itself was a bit off, I move the flash to the right or left and keep testing until I like how the light and shadows play on the subject.

If you feel you’ve nailed the perfect lighting, feel free to delete some of the “dud” test exposures, and/or “star” the image with the best lighting for each scene in-camera if possible. However, don’t delete ALL the exposures except one, because you might want to combine one or two flashed images later for truly perfect lighting.

Flash Exposure Settings Guidelines

The brightness of a flash or strobe is known as its power, and this is measured in stops just the same as your camera settings. These stops count down from “full power”, or 1/1 power. 1/2 power is 1 EV darker, and 1/4 power is 2 EVs darker. Flash power usually ranges from 1/1 at its brightest, to 1/128 at its darkest for hotshoe strobes, or 1/16 or 1/32 for larger studio strobes.

The only slightly confusing thing to remember is that 1/1 power is not the same on all flashes. Different flashes can be brighter at 1/1 power, which is why large studio strobes are useful when you need a lot of light.

On your camera, start at a basic exposure of a low ISO, an aperture that allows you to get everything in the scene relatively sharp, and whatever shutter speed gives you a balanced ambient exposure.

Let’s say, ISO 100, f/5.6, and 1/20 sec for an average interior. Add your flash at ½ or ¼ power, and see how it looks. If the ambient exposure is too bright or too dark, change your shutter speed but avoid changing your aperture or ISO because those will affect the flash brightness too.

If your flash is too bright or too dark, you can easily dial it up or down a stop, or if your flash is at full power and still not bright enough, you can try a higher ISO and a faster shutter speed, because that will effectively give the same ambient exposure but a brighter flash exposure.

(Flash does not get brighter or darker with your shutter speed, asl long as you’re below your sync speed which is usually 1/200 sec.)

C. Modified Flash (Umbrella, Softbox, Sphere, etc)

A small magmod/Lightsphere type light is a good way to fill a whole room with light, although it doesn’t offer the large “softness” and directional control of an umbrella or softbox

If you need to illuminate a specific subject without putting a blown-out white spot on the ceiling, then you can use direct flash but with a light modifier.

This sounds advanced, but it’s easier than you think to add a simple umbrella, softbox, or dome/sphere  to your existing lighting setup. We’ll continue to demonstrate direct flash techniques in the next section…

Method 2.)  Flash, Multiple & Composite Exposures

Just like with bounced flash, start by testing your flash in different positions and angles, and adjust the brightness (power) and angle so that the lighting and any shadows in your scene look good.

Sometimes, your interior or exterior composition is complex enough that you need to light a subject from multiple angles, or illuminate different subjects one at a time, …or actually stand in your shot to get the lighting right!

When this happens, it can still be accomplished relatively quickly when you’re on location, but will of course require quite a bit of work in post-production.

Post-Production: Layer Masking For Real Estate Photography

Whenever merging becomes necessary in post-production, whether manually in Photoshop or with an HDR application such as Photomatix, make sure to post-process all of your exposures identically, with “auto-sync” turned on in Lightroom, or synchronize the edits later with Capture One or other software.

If you’re going to be merging images manually in Photoshop, then be extra careful to process them identically, especially noting that things like the lens distortion/vignetting correction profile are applied to all images. Process the raw images to your liking, and then open them as smart objects if possible, to retain raw editing, or just as layers if you’d prefer the quickest possible trip from Lightroom to Photoshop and back again, and don’t plan to do anything more serious than a quick layer mask to “erase” something from the main image or images that are illuminated with flash.

In Photoshop, create a layer mask on any layers that contain something you wish to erase, and mask it out with a black brush on a white mask. Or if a layer contains a small part that you wish to add to the overall scene, brush it in using a white brush on a black mask, making sure that your layer is at the very top of the stack.

In case you’re new to layer masking, you “erase” or “reveal” parts of an image, without actually destroying the image itself, by brushing in black or white (respectively) on the layer mask.

The final image should hide any lighting equipment that was present in the composition, erase any harsh shadows, and/or combine different lighting schemes for a perfect, well-lit result.

Method 3.)  Merge Both Flash and HDR Techniques

7-EV bracket, flash added to each exposure to clean up shadows

For the ultimate level of control over the light in your image, accept this challenge: combine both HDR bracketing and the use of flash!

There are two ways to combine HDR and flash. Some photographers might want to keep it simple and just add a flash to each exposure in the HDR bracket, while other photographers might prefer to create a bracketed HDR sequence, then separately capture a few exposures using flash, and work in post-production to selectively merge the flash exposures with the HDR as necessary.

If either method sounds overly complicated, don’t worry! Start with the latter- just shoot an HDR sequence as you normally would, and shoot a few flash-illuminated interior shots as you normally would, and don’t worry about combining them in post-production unless either individual method fails. (We’ll get to the post-production next!)

One last tip: if you decide to add flash to every exposure of your HDR, just make sure your flash has enough time to recycle and be ready to “pop” again at the correct power. You might want to turn your camera’s drive speed (FPS, frames-per-second) down to “Continuous Low” speed, and/or use exposure delay mode if your camera is capable of doing both at once.

Nikon’s Self-timer has options to set up to 3 sec intervals between (up to 9) shots.

Setting up exposure bracketing on Nikon (mirrorless, Z7) cameras

A cable release or wireless camera control is very useful in accomplishing the final result, and other cameras (such as Nikon, pictured above) now have options for setting up to a 3 second delay between each shot when using self-timer shooting to capture a bracketed sequence.

Post-Production: Flash Plus HDR For Real Estate Photography

Many photographers prefer to start in Lightroom with their raw images, and then go into Photoshop or an HDR application with TIF or JPG converted files as needed. Photomatix offers a Lightroom plugin, as well as direct raw image conversion if desired. Like Lightroom, Photomatix offers automated lens correction profiles for distortion and vignetting, if necessary.

Set the HDR blending preferences to your taste, such as the alignment and cropping options, raw conversion options, and deghosting options.

In most cases, we’re shooting interiors from a tripod, so turn on any available lens correction profile, turn off “Crop aligned images” and leave deghosting off as well.

When you reach the final HDR interface, start by choosing a preset that gets close to your desired look, and then adding slight changes to the key sliders such as Strength, Saturation, White/Black Clipping, and other sliders for different methods of tonal control.

Generally speaking, the goal for most images is to process them brightly, yet still with enough overall contrast so as to look natural and realistic.

Consider saving your customized slider options as a preset, if you have similar images from that same shoot (or future shoots) to process.

Final Image – Balance of HDR  Bracketing and Flash

The final HDR image can be added to your traditional Lightroom workflow as a TIF or JPG image, for any final subtle tweaks to color or contrast, before delivery to your client.

Conclusion | Real Estate Photography Lighting Made Simple

With this knowledge, and with just a small investment in equipment and practice, you should feel totally prepared and confident in your ability to add lighting to your real estate photography, and tackle any tough shooting environment!

If you have any questions about lighting for real estate photography, or any tips or tricks of your own, please leave a comment below!

Read our complete guide to Real Estate Photography:

A Step By Step Guide On How To Become A Real Estate Photographer

Ten Tips To Be Profitable In Real Estate Photography

Real Estate Photography Equipment Guide: Cameras, Lenses, Accessories & Software

HDR Versus Flash In Real Estate Photography

SLR Lounge And Photomatix

We’d like to thank the folks at HDRsoft one more time for sponsoring this content and allowing us to provide this extensive guide to real estate photography.

Here at our studio we have actually been using Photomatix software for about ten years now, for not just landscape and real estate photography, but also portrait photography and venue detail shots.

The advice given in these articles is our own, based on years of professional experience and actual use of the equipment, techniques, post-production workflows, and business skills that are outlined. Thank you for reading, and good luck in your creative and business endeavors!

It might seem simple at first – just take pictures of houses and rooms, and get paid! However, there is certainly a lot more that goes into it, from the preparation and shooting to finding clients, communicating with them, and ensuring their satisfaction with a beautiful final product.

So, we’ve created this quick but thorough tutorial to help you get started. We’ll continue this series with additional tips on how to actually photograph real estate itself, the gear you need, the post-production, and the business side of things. So, read on, and stay tuned for more!

Thank you to HDRsoft for sponsoring this tutorial series and making it possible. The tips given in this tutorial are based on professional experience by our full-time photographer staff, and are our own opinions and advice.

Step 1 | Get the Right Gear For Real Estate Photography

Believe it or not, even though real estate photography does require a few particular bits of camera equipment, none of it is especially exotic or expensive. This is because of the basic nature of photographing such subjects as interior rooms, or exterior property images, which is, you’re photographing a static subject that you have complete control over. This means you don’t need a camera with pricey features like action-tracking autofocus or high frame rates, etc.

Two camera features which will indeed come in handy are the ability to bracket multiple exposures, and the ability to trigger a flash. Thankfully, all advanced/serious cameras (and even most beginner models) have both of these features.

So, what is the most important piece of gear? A solid tripod. Next, a wide-angle lens. However, since you’ll be on a tripod most of the time, your lens does not need to be an exotic fast-aperture one, it just has to be wide-angle, or what’s known as ultra-wide.

If you have these two items (a sturdy tripod and a wide-angle zoom lens) then almost any camera body will get the job done! Even a crop-sensor camera body can be used for totally professional results (as long as your wide-angle lens is made for that body).

A fourth item that will be of great use is a basic wireless flash. You can use this to illuminate interiors, either by bouncing the flash off the ceiling and walls behind the camera, or by using a diffuser such as an umbrella or softbox. However, this bit of equipment isn’t entirely critical, so don’t be intimidated by the thought of having to shop for softboxes and light stands and radio triggers, yet!

Alternately, if you’re not interested in flash, (or more likely, you’re photographing large exteriors where flash is simply not an option!) then the final tool will be a professional HDR workflow and software.

Step 2 | Get Image Editing Tools for Real Estate Photography

Even if you have a solid tripod, a great camera, and the best lens for the job, you still need to know how to edit the images you take! A Raw processing program is a must-have for almost all professional work, however for real estate photography there will be a need for advanced Photoshop processing, as well as an HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing application. You might even need to process multiple HDR images in batches for particular jobs.

Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop can get a lot done all by themselves, and HDR software such as Photomatix Pro offers both high-quality and advanced tone controls for editing bracketed images, as well as highly efficient batch processing capabilities.

• Check Out Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC
• Check Out Photomatix HDR Software

We’ll get deeper into the equipment in a future article, so stay tuned for that. For now, this basic guideline should be able to get you started.

Step 3 | Learn and Practice Photographing Real Estate

Before shooting a paid job, you absolutely must practice, and be sure of exactly what your camera gear is capable of. Not only will it help you work efficiently when you’re on a “real” job, it will also help you ensure that you deliver highly professional results.

In future articles of this series, we’ll dive to real estate photography techniques, tips and tricks, so be sure to stay tuned to this series.  To get started, here are a few critical concepts.

Understand What Images to Capture

Start with understanding the right images to capture. The best thing you can do is practice, while closely studying existing property listings and images of the types of things you’re most likely to actually photograph. As a general rule, get one or two images of every interior room, (or have the client make a list of the specific rooms they want to be photographed); and get 3-5 images of property exteriors, including the front yard and the backyard.

Watch Your Angles

Be careful not to angle your camera upward or downward too much, because vertical lines should usually appear as close to perfectly vertical as possible. This can be corrected in post-production, but only to a certain degree.

Understand The Dynamic Range Of Your Camera

Digital camera sensor dynamic range has come a long way in the last 10 years, but it’s still not infinite. You should always understand just what your camera is capable of; never tell yourself, “oh, I can recover those shadows in post-production!”

Even if you just bought a fancy new camera that everybody says has amazing shadow recovery, you still should perform a test. Shoot a dramatic sunset with a property or other subject that is in complete shadow, start by saving your highlights, and see how many stops (EVs) you have to brighten the exposure before you can see into those shadows.

Since exterior property images are almost always best at sunset or twilight, you’ll want to make sure you always capture the full dynamic range of a scene when you’re on the job. Unfortunately, each camera has very different setups for exposure bracketing, so play around with it and make sure you know exactly how to bracket a scene very quickly before you go out on paid jobs!

Building A Portfolio For Real Estate Photography

Getting into any portfolio-related business is always a catch-22: how can you get professional work if you don’t have a portfolio of professional images to show potential clients? Thankfully, real estate photography is actually one of the easiest fields to build a great portfolio for!

First and foremost, you can of course practice with your own home, if you can make some of the rooms presentable enough. Or if you have a friend who has an ideal home, they might be willing to allow you to photograph a couple of rooms.

Also, anything that you can photograph in a public place is fair game! Just be respectful and safe, as always. (It helps to carry business cards stating that you’re a photographer.)

Of course, you can always cold-call real estate agents in your area. You might get a “no” 19 times, but the 20th might be a yes… Alternately, sometimes online vacation rentals (Air BnB, VRBO, etc.) could use a few great interior and/or exterior images.

Lastly, keep in mind that this is just your portfolio, not an actual property listing. As such, feel free to use Photoshop extensively to clean up and beautify your images! If there’s a window with a brick wall or an ugly backyard outside, try swapping it for a beautiful view of a beach or a mountain. Such tricks would never be allowed in an actual listing, of course, but it’s good practice for your Photoshop skills! (One thing that is very common in actual property listings is, using Photoshop to swap a boring sunset sky with a more dramatic one.)

Real Estate Photography Business – Getting Work

When you’re ready to actually charge money, it may not be enough to simply put your portfolio online and get business cards printed. These days, the process of “breaking into” any photography market is pretty involved, and often a long-term game.

Firstly, of course, you’ll want to do the obvious: reach out to real estate agents in your area, or to other photographers in the area who might need an assistant on bigger jobs. Also, there are many other channels you can pursue, from paid advertising online, to good ‘ol SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) or even in-person sales at local events or cold-calling phone numbers you see on local property “for sale” signs.

As with any business endeavor, it can take a lot of hard work to get your foot in the door. The key is to just keep trying different things, and don’t give up!

Should You Shoot For Free First?

It might be okay to photograph one or two jobs for free if you really do need the practice, and can’t promise professional results yet. Just make sure that you’re not being taken advantage of by a client who absolutely could have paid you at least some small amount for your time. There’s something about your sheer dignity, that makes a huge difference between asking for a mere $50 or just doing a job for absolutely nothing.

When you really do know what you’re doing, though, you should be charging money. No matter how many times you hear, “I can’t offer you money this time, but if you do a good job, there’s a chance we can pay you on the next job,” don’t believe it!

See, here’s the deal: When you shoot for free, that client will probably expect to be able to get away with it again. Worse, however, is this- every time you do an unpaid job, you’re building a reputation as a person who shoots for free. This sets a precedent and makes it all the more difficult to charge money later. Imagine trying to charge a client $5,000 or $10,000 for a job, when just a few years ago you did free work for them. Awkward!

So, take pride in your professionalism when you say, “I’m sorry, I can’t accept future business as payment for current work; thank you for understanding!”

What should you charge?

Ideally, what to charge for real estate photography will depend entirely on the area/value of the property itself, as the scope of the job, as well as how much time you will spend working on it.

For example, if you can shoot and post-produce the entire job in half a day, that’s one thing, but if you have to spend a few hours consulting with the client, renting the right gear, plus a half day or a whole day shooting the images, and then of course another day (or more) doing advanced post-production, …then you’re going to need to charge a lot more.

We’ll get into what to charge, and how to go about setting up your pricing, in a future article.

Before we move on, here’s a basic overview. Of course, the exact numbers will vary depending on your location, but a “quick” job might only pay $100-200, or as much as $500-1000. A larger job may range from just a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars.

Even if you have to start on the low end and work your way up, the absolute best thing you can do for yourself is, keep track of all the hours you spend on each job, plus running your business in general, …and add it all up. Not only can you determine what you’re actually paying yourself by the hour, but just as importantly, you can determine just how many jobs you can actually fit into a single week.

In future articles, we’ll dive deeper into the business side of real estate photography! Please leave a comment below if you have any particular questions on the subject.

Conclusion | Getting Into Real Estate Photography

This article should provide you with enough information to give real estate photography a try, however, there is still much more to learn! So, stay tuned for additional articles that get into greater detail about the gear, the shooting, and the business aspects of real estate photography. In the meantime, please leave a comment below if you have any questions about real estate (and architectural) photography, or the business behind it, etc.

Thank you again to HDRsoft for sponsoring this article! If you are thinking of getting into real estate photography, or any type of photography that requires bracketing and HDR processing, check out what they can do!

The first type of distortion is when a lens “accidentally” makes a straight line curve or wobble when it should be straight. (So, not a fisheye lens, but a wide-angle lens…)

The other type of distortion is when two lines that ought to be parallel, (usually vertical) appear to “lean” in or out, depending on the angle of the composition. This is known as keystoning or converging verticals. This isn’t an optical “flaw” in the lens, but it can be a form of distortion that is very unnerving.

Indeed, in most real estate photographs, these issues should be avoided, or corrected, as perfectly as possible. So, let’s dive in and find the most effective, efficient solutions!

This article is sponsored by HDRsoft, makers of Photomatix HDR software, which has been our preferred software for merging bracketed exposures into natural, realistic HDR images for both portraiture and real estate for the last 10 years!

What Are Barrel, Pincushion, and Mustache Distortion?

One of the most annoying types of distortion is when a lens just isn’t optically perfect, and causes straight lines to curve or wobble, “by accident” so to speak.

With barrel distortion, a straight line near the edge of the image  will bend or bow outward. With pincushion distortion, the straight lines will visibly bow inward instead.

Lastly, if a straight line does both, if it curves back and forth, that is known as mustache distortion. This is pretty common on some of the more affordable, compact ultra-wide lenses such as 14mm primes.

But, before you feel too overwhelmed, don’t worry, these types of lens distortions are by far the easiest to fix! Well, most of the time.

How Do You Correct Common Lens Distortion?

There are two main ways to correct this category of distortion in your real estate photos. First, you can see if your lens has a correction profile in the post-production software that you’re using, or, second, you can attempt to correct it manually.

The good news  is that you usually don’t need to do this, because almost every lense these days has a correction profile available in your raw conversion software such as Adobe Lightroom or Capture One, and also in specialized software such as Photomatix if you’re creating HDR images.

These correction profiles can be turned on and left on by default, so you might never notice a problem with “wobbly” lines in your photos! Just double-check and make sure the lens profile is turned on by default.

More and more modern lenses have profiles already embedded in them

Some of the newest (mirrorless) lenses permanently embed their correction profile in the images’ raw file data, and you can only turn it on or off in-camera! For any of the newest mirrorless cameras with new mirrorless lenses, check your in-camera settings to make sure distortion correction is turned on!

NOTE: After in-depth testing, we have determined that, depending on your camera and lens, if you accidentally turn off distortion correction in-camera you may still see the “Built-in Lens Profile applied” notice in Lightroom, but NOT receive the full correction! Thankfully, you should still be able to apply the full correction profile. Below, you can see an example of how vignetting was corrected almost perfectly in-camera, but the distortion was not, and had to be corrected in post-production:

Some all-manual lenses have profiles that you can custom select

If your lens has no electronic contacts, then, of course, it cannot automatically get its profile applied. Don’t panic! The profile may still be available in Lightroom if you manually select it.

Also, a few obscure lenses may have lens profiles available for download, but are not included in Lightroom, so you’ll have to search for them. Thankfully, this is extremely rare now.

Unfortunately, the final bad news is that if you have a very old lens with no correction profile available at all, then manual distortion correction tools in software like Lightroom are usually very basic and only offer a single adjustment slider for barrel or pincushion distortion correction. Therefore, if your wide-angle lens has more complicated distortion, you’re basically out of luck unless you care to spend a whole lot of time manually correcting every image in Photoshop.

Keystone (Perspective) Distortion

This type of distortion isn’t actually an optical lens flaw, it’s a natural characteristic of your viewing angle. If you’re up high and looking down, vertical lines will visually converge in a downward “V” shape. If you’re down low and looking upward, vertical lines will do the opposite, and lean in an “A” shape.

In real estate photography, you usually want vertical lines to stay vertical, that is, to NOT “lean” in or out. It’s just visually unsettling and unnatural looking. But, how do you get vertical lines to always remain perfectly up-and-down?

How Can You Avoid the Keystone Effect in Real Estate Photos?

If you need to aim your lens just slightly up or down, though, you’ll immediately see the walls and other vertical lines in your image begin to “warp” with that keystone effect. What do you do? You’ll have to aim your compositions slightly upward or downward for many of your photos, indeed.

Don’t worry, this particular type of perspective distortion is very easy to correct!

You could, of course, buy a specialized tilt-shift or perspective-correction lens, and use it to correct your images in the field, but that’s a pretty fancy optic, and you might not need such a lens. Before you decide, let’s see how easy it is to correct this type of distortion…

How Do You Correct The Keystone Distortion?

Thankfully, again, Lightroom does have both automated and manual options. Also, you’ll have final straightening options with specialty software such as Photomatix.

You can try the automatic tool for straightening in Lightroom, and “upright mode” seems to do an OK job sometimes.

However, my personal preference is to use Lightroom’s awesome tool for manually “tracing” lines that should be either vertical or horizontal, and having them automatically skew to become perfectly up-and-down, or horizontal.

This particular method is my favorite, because it allows you to effortlessly correct varying degrees of slant, and also to correct for a level horizon at the same time!

Just select the tool, and then click-and-drag two vertical lines on the left and right edge of the image, following existing lines in the scene that ought to be vertical. Lastly, if your horizon is a bit off, you can draw a third line horizontally and Lightroom will know what to do with that line, too.

If possible, frame your composition to have perfectly vertical lines in the first place!
Your in-camera level and grid can help achieve this, in addition to leveling the horizon.

Conclusion | Real Estate Photography & Lens Distortion

There you have it! Hopefully, with this knowledge, you’ll be able to tackle any type of distortion, natural or unnatural, with ease. To recap:

• Always make sure that your camera has its barrel/pincushion distortion turned on in-camera, in case the lens you’re using has a permanently embedded correction profile.
• In Lightroom, always make sure that your defaults for the Develop Module include leaving the Lens Profile Correction tool on, and is set to “Automatic”.
• Learn how to quickly “fix” vertical lines that aren’t vertical, using the automatic or manual correction tools.
• If your workflow is getting any more complicated and time-consuming than this, you might need to rethink what you’re doing, or find another lens that has a perfect correction profile provided for it.

If you’re really serious about getting things perfect on-location, or if you just enjoy cool gear toys, (isn’t that part of the fun of photography?) …maybe consider a tilt-shift lens, or a DSLR-to-mirrorless lens adapter such as the Venus Optics Laowa Magic Shift Converter, which turns a 12mm full-frame lens into a 17mm tilt-shift lens with +/- 10mm of shift capability. These specialty tools aren’t absolutely necessary, but they can be a lot of fun!

Either way, you should now feel equipped with the knowledge required to handle any unexpected obstacle that your lenses might throw at you on your next real estate or architectural photo shoot. Good luck!

Our complete series of guides for Real Estate Photography

• A Step By Step Guide On How To Become A Real Estate Photographer
• Ten Tips To Be Profitable In Real Estate Photography
• Real Estate Photography Equipment Guide: Cameras, Lenses, Accessories & Software
• HDR Versus Flash In Real Estate Photography
• Real Estate Photography Lighting Guide
• Six Common Real Estate Photography Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

Thanks again to HDRsoft for sponsoring this content and allowing us to bring you these tutorials on how to shoot and edit real estate photos. Stay tuned for future articles about both the shooting, editing, and business side of real estate! 

Thank you to HDRsoft for sponsoring this tutorial series and making it possible. The tips given in this tutorial are based on professional experience by our full-time photographer staff, and are our own opinions and advice.

Real Estate Photography Challenge: Difficult Lighting

Real estate photographers often find themselves working in very challenging conditions. Despite the relatively static nature of a property exterior or interior, it can be difficult to figure out what lighting looks best in a scene, and what exposure settings should be used to capture it correctly.

Many times, an image simply has far more dynamic range (contrast) than even the best digital cameras can capture in a single exposure. Or, maybe the way the ambient light falls on the furniture just isn’t very flattering. Either way, you’ll have to learn how to work around such obstacles.

Clearly, a single exposure will not be able to capture this interior and exterior scene!
Canon 5D mk3, Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 L | 1/25 sec, f/13, ISO 100

Sometimes, the quickest and easiest thing to do is to simply use bracketing to capture multiple exposures, to recover detail in highlights or shadows that would have been pure white or pure black in a single exposure.

Other times, you may need to add your own light to the scene, usually strobe/flash, even if it requires a little extra time and equipment.

In this article, we’ll break down the advantages and disadvantages of each method, as well as how to shoot and post-process them.

Real Estate Photography | What is HDR?

For those who still haven’t heard of HDR photography yet, the concept is simple: As you’re shooting, you capture multiple images and change your exposure (but nothing else, such as composition, etc.) in between each click of the shutter.

This process, known as bracketing, allows you to get detail in both highlights and shadows by combining all of the bracketed images into one final image during post-production, using an HDR application such as Photomatix.

Advantages to Using HDR For Real Estate Photography

There are a few advantages to using HDR techniques in real estate photography, namely the fact that you don’t need additional equipment, and you can work faster on-location and in post-production.

Simplicity of Shooting

With HDR bracketing for real estate photography, all you have to do is set up like you normally would, and then vary your shutter speed to capture bracketed images. Of course using a tripod is useful for interiors, if your shutter speed is very long, however if you bracket exterior images hand-held with steady technique, good HDR merging software can auto-align your images for you! Either way, you just don’t need any special gear.

This allows a working photographer to get a job done very quickly, including both interior and exterior images of a property, with a minimal amount of equipment and setup/break-down time while on-location. For a professional, working quickly can make a huge difference in the amount of money you make! (Especially if you have to photograph multiple properties in one day!)

[Check out our article on the business side of real estate photography here!]

Simplicity of Processing

With HDR images, in post-production all you have to do is let automated software do its thing with your bracketed images, and then dial in the tones to your liking.

The Photomatix interface | Often a single preset is perfect for your scene, but fine-tuning the highlights and shadows is also quick and easy.

You don’t need to spend extra minutes or hours doing complicated Photoshop editing, to combine different images manually, like you might have to do if you use flash to illuminate individual parts of your scene one at a time.

Adobe Lightroom does have a basic HDR merging feature which creates a single DNG file, which is convenient for quick and simple raw edits. However, Photomatix offers many additional tools, and its features like deghosting usually work more reliably. Either way, for advanced control over your tones and fine details in an image, having an external, dedicated HDR application such as Photomatix (with seamless integration into Lightroom, of course) does help to give you the extra capabilities that a working professional can require.

Disadvantages of Using HDR For Real Estate Photography

Of course, with HDR bracketing and processing, you are at the mercy of the ambient light. You can control this existing light a little bit by turning the lights in a room on or off.

However, sometimes certain shadow areas just don’t look good, no matter how brightly you expose them with natural light. Instead, maybe they ought to be well-lit with additional lighting so that they receive the subject emphasis needed to create a professional result. For this, you’ll have to supplement your workflow with your own lighting, usually strobe or hotshoe flashes.

HDR versus Flash – which image do you prefer?

How To Shoot And Post-Produce HDR Images Of Real Estate Property

First, frame your scene as you normally would, and pay attention to all ambient light, indoors and outdoors. Turn on/off lights as necessary, to avoid any distracting shadows or specular highlights.

Next, it’s time to bracket multiple exposures. You want to capture enough bracketed images to clearly reveal detail in both the brightest highlights and darkest shadows of any scene.

You can either do this bracketing process manually, or by using your camera’s automated bracketing feature (called ‘Auto Exposure Bracketing’ or ‘AEB). If you adjust your exposure manually between each shot, don’t worry, the auto-align function in your HDR software will take care of any faint movement of the camera. Just don’t bump your tripod during a long exposure!

Seven bracketed exposures from dark to light reveal detail in both highlights and shadows.
Checking your histogram will quickly help you make sure that you’ve bracketed enough shots!

Most cameras these days have a bracketing function that offers 5, 7, or even 9-image bracketing, in at least 1EV increments. 1EV increments are a good starting point, but either way, the goal is to always keep an eye on your histogram and capture as many images as you need. (See the example above, and watch the histogram move from left to right!)

If you’re ever having trouble figuring out how many shots you need to bracket for a particular scene, HDRsoft has a useful exposure bracketing calculator HERE that you can use, by plugging in your brightest and darkest shutter speeds, as well as your camera’s bracketing range.

This process can be extremely quick once you get the hang of it, allowing you to photograph many rooms/interiors very quickly. With automated bracketing and faster shutter speeds, you can even capture HDR images of exteriors hand-held!

Canon bracketing function example: 7 images, 1 EV increments

Sony bracketing function example: 5 images, 1 EV increments

One more set of tips: You’ll want to shoot in RAW, of course. Also, don’t be confused by some cameras’ built-in HDR feature, which usually creates a JPG file. Some photographers get mixed up because in-camera bracketing is not the same as in-camera HDR. Although some cameras (Canons, for example, see below) can also save the raw frames when using the in-camera HDR feature, the simplest way to operate in the field is to just use basic exposure bracketing.

Canon in-camera HDR feature – this is NOT the same as the camera’s bracketing feature!

Real Estate HDR Post-Production Workflow

To start off with your (raw) workflow, process each of your bracketed images rather neutrally, with low contrast and little sharpening applied. This is very easy with a preset, and all you need to finalize is your white balance.

It is also important to make sure that your raw processing software has recognized any lens correction profile that may be available, to correct image quality problems such as distortion or vignetting.

Next, export the raw-edited images as either JPG or TIF, and then open those images in your HDR application such as Photomatix. Usually, I like to pre-process my raw files in Adobe with a bit of negative contrast as well as some highlight and shadow recovery, and of course the lens correction profile to keep straight lines straight.

You can also just open raw images directly in Photomatix, of course, however if you do the raw images will be firstly processed by Photomatix, and won’t recognize the Adobe editing which can be useful. Note that Photomatix does now offer lens profiles to correct distortion and vignetting, as well as tools for removing chromatic aberration.

Once in the HDR editing software, select a processing preset that suits your images. If it is a type of scene you often photograph, we highly recommend creating a preset for those settings!

By the way, clients (usually real estate agents) often prefer brightly lit/processed rooms, because they appear more warm and inviting! Just a quick tip for your overall editing style…

Finally, bring the image back into Photoshop or Lightroom, if necessary, to apply the final levels of contrast and “pop”, to your (or your clients’) taste.

Using Flash For Real Estate Photography

If the natural light in a room or scene simply needs a little more help, then it may be time to add your own light to the scene. Adding flash to your real estate photography workflow can seem like a hassle, however it is actually quite easy, if time allows for it.

Advantages to Flash For Real Estate Photography

Adding flash to your images will allow you to change the light in a room entirely, and illuminate areas that should be accentuated even if they are naturally in shadow.

Single exposure, 1 flash, bounced off the wall/ceiling to the left of the camera at ½ power
1/80 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100

Potentially, you could add enough flash to an interior or other scene so as to capture it all in a single exposure! In theory this is entirely possible with enough light, however in practice it may be more complex. Often times if a room has mirrors or other reflective surfaces, you may find that the perfect lighting for most of the image results in a reflection or “hot spot” in another part of the image.

The way to work around this is to capture 2-3 different exposures/layers, and then combine them using layer masks in Photoshop. Again, it’s a relatively simple process, though it can still be time-consuming if you have a high volume of total images to deliver.

Disadvantages to Flash For Real Estate Photography

There are two main disadvantages to using flash, or any other sort of supplemental light on-location. First, of course, is the cost of the additional equipment. Especially if you get more than just a single flash. (Light stands, brackets, all kinds of light modifiers, larger strobes, etc.)

Second, there is a lot of extra setup time. Unfortunately, you don’t always have enough time to set up, move around, and break down flashes for lighting every single room of a property. Depending on how quickly you work and how simple or complex your setup is, it might take double or triple the time to shoot with flash instead of just bracketing exposures.

There is also the strong likelihood of lots of additional processing- Unless you can perfectly light an entire room with multiple flashes, and also have none of the flashes appear in the captured image, you’ll probably have to layer mask 2-3 or more different images to combine different areas of a scene that are perfectly lit.

In fact, in a room with a lot of mirrors or reflective surfaces, and/or low ceilings or odd-shaped rooms in general, capturing an entire scene in a single exposure may be impossible with flash.

How To Shoot And Post-Produce Real Estate Images Using Flash

As always, frame your shot, and determine which areas or subjects in the image need to be illuminated. Main subjects like tables, chairs/couches, or beds often are the primary subject in the types of scenes that will benefit from using flash.

Next, determine what angle the subject(s) should be illuminated from. For example, often times it makes sense to illuminate a subject from a similar direction as the ambient (window) light, allowing certain parts of the image to still have a bit of shadow. This makes the image well-balanced, yet still interesting to look at, and not too flat-toned.

Sometimes, all an image needs is a little bit of brightening overall- bouncing a flash off the ceiling (behind the camera) can help fill a room with light, giving very natural looking results.

Also, consider this: is it better to bounce the flash off the ceiling, (if the ceiling isn’t included in your composition) or is it better to direct-flash the subject, either with a bare flash or a diffused light source such as an umbrella or softbox? Bare flash will of course create harsh light on a subject, while using a lighting modifier or bounced flash will create a softer light.

Unfortunately, using direct flash may often require the flash setup itself to be in the image. This will require you to shoot multiple images: one frame with the flash illuminating the key subject, and another frame with the flash removed from the image entirely, or illuminating a different part of the image.

Post-Production

As always, process all of your images as identically as possible, especially if you have to combine multiple images as layers in Photoshop.

Using simple layer masks to remove unwanted shadows when using multiple flash angles

If necessary, open images as layers in Photoshop, and mask the parts of the different layers that you want to hide/reveal in order to achieve the perfect lighting throughout the entire image.

(In our next article, we will dig even deeper into lighting and post-producing for real estate photography, so stay tuned!)

Conclusion | HDR versus Flash For Real Estate Photography

Let us summarize by saying, first and foremost, that there is never just one right way to accomplish a photographic goal or job. However, to be honest there are indeed plenty of scenarios in which a certain technique is in fact preferable to another, due to which constraints that may be placed on the photographer, or the desired final result.

What is the absolute best thing you can do, whether you’re a responsible working professional, or just an aspiring pro? Master multiple techniques! Become an expert at rapidly recognizing the light in a scene, and identifying which method of shooting is best.

In other words, you never want to find yourself in a work environment where you have to use a less than ideal technique for the task, just because you haven’t mastered the optimal technique yet, nor do you want to have to try and stumble your way through the optimal technique.

Sony A9, Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM, 2-image HDR | 20 sec, f/5.6, ISO 100 | 10 sec, f/11, ISO 100
Photomatix Processing: “Tone Balancer: Realistic” preset, no additional adjustments

Thankfully, it’s easy enough to practice and master both techniques. In fact, if you’re up for a real challenge, you may even want to combine both techniques into one- shooting bracketed exposures while also adding flash to some of the shots!

HDR real estate photography doesn’t require any special equipment, as long as you already own a tripod and your camera offers bracketing. Simply give an HDR merging software a try, and start practicing right away with a relatively friendly learning curve.

As for lighting, you can get started with a very affordable, simple setup that still offers all the professional functionality you need. And, believe it or not, it doesn’t even have to be that expensive or complicated/intimidating! One of the cheapest, most user-friendly options is a Yongnuo 560 III flash and 560TX radio controller. The YN560 system is no-frills, (no TTL, no HSS) and it allows you to wirelessly control your flashes’ power and even zoom head setting, and sets you back just about $60 for the flash and $40 for the controller.

As mentioned above, we’ll get more in-depth with lighting for real estate photography in our next article, including complete gear recommendations plus how to shoot and post-process single exposures, composite images, and bracketed HDR images using flash. In the meantime, leave a comment below if you have any questions or tips!

For additional tips on getting into real estate photography, here is a step-by-step guide to getting into real estate photography! Also, here is a guide to real estate photography pricing.

1. Don’t Show Up Without The Right Lens For The Job.

One mistake that a real estate photographer can make when shooting their first few jobs is, simply having the wrong lens. For example, if you’re going to be shooting in very tight quarters you’ll probably want a wide-angle zoom lens. Oppositely, if you’re doing a lot of outdoor work, a normal or telephoto lens can be very useful, especially the more space around the property you have, or if there are any beautiful backdrops such as mountains, beaches, etc.

This does NOT mean that you must go buy expensive, exotic lenses right away before you shoot any real estate work. The key is simply to know what you’re getting yourself into with each job. There are plenty of jobs that you can accomplish quite well with just a 24-70mm or 24-105mm lens, if the interiors are spacious and the desired images are simple compositions.

However, if you’re photographing a lot of tight quarters, or small rooms, then having something like a 16-35mm or 14-24mm ultra-wide lens could really save the day. If you don’t have one of these lenses yet, try renting one!

Again, don’t mistake this for needing the most truly exotic, expensive lens. In almost all real estate photos, your goal is to get everything in focus, so you’ll be stopping your lens down in most cases. Even a modest, affordable lens like the Tamron 17-28mm f/2.8 (for Sony mirrorless) or 17-35mm f/2.8-4 (for DSLRs) can work wonders. Or, if you need to go even wider on a budget, Rokinon’s 14mm f/2.8 lens is extremely affordable, and now offers a distortion correction profile.

(To read more about lens distortion and how to fix it, stay tuned for a future article coming soon!)

The most important thing you can do is, ask your client some questions about the size of the property, the rooms, and ask them what types of photos they’re expecting. This simple, easy communication can go a long way towards helping you deliver above and beyond the clients’ expectations!

If you’re stuck with whatever lens you have on hand, for one job here or there, the good news is that if you have a really good eye for strong compositions, and/or if you can do a quick panoramic stitch, then the client may not know that you didn’t bring the “optimal” lens for a job.

Unfortunately, from here on out, the rest of our tips will definitely be things that a client will notice, so if you weren’t already, it’s time to start taking serious notes!

2. Don’t Promise A Turnaround Time You Can’t Deliver On.

One of the biggest cardinal sins that your clients will definitely notice, is if you simply don’t deliver on time. Never promise that you can have images to them in just a day or two, and then take a week or two instead. You’ll probably never hear from that client again!

In real estate photography, each job’s required turnaround time can vary, but it is not uncommon for the client to expect, indeed require, the images as immediately as possible. If they’re having you photograph a property, they probably want to list it as soon as possible.

Some other types of professional photographers may be shocked by the idea of having to deliver a completed set of images in just 24 hours, or even just a couple of days, but sometimes it’s part of the job! Simply schedule yourself enough time after each job, either the same day or the following morning, to get your images processed.

Thankfully, post-production for real estate doesn’t have to be too complicated. If your images are simple single exposures, basic color correction that is batch applied to every image of a room with similar lighting may be sufficient, with only minor image-to-image tweaks.

If you have any reason to create composite images, oftentimes things like panoramas and HDRs can be done effortlessly within Lightroom, or for greater control with a highly streamlined process, dedicated HDR software such as Photomatix by HDRsoft can seamlessly integrate into your workflow, even for batches of bracketed images.

No matter what you do, the best thing you can do is deliver ahead of schedule. When it comes to making clients remember you as a professional that they’d love to work with again, nothing creates an awesome impression like surprising them by delivering good-looking images early.

3. Don’t Forget To Ask The Client To Prepare The Space For You!

This is a big one, and if you’re a softspoken artist who likes to be self-sufficient and never ask for anything, it can be difficult to break that ice and request that the client prepare the space to be photographed.

The truth is, thankfully, this is a very common practice, so you’re not asking too much if you require, even in your contract, that the property be “ready to photograph” when you arrive. Aside from a few minutes of putting things away if someone is actively living in a property, you should be able to arrive and start shooting as soon as you’ve had a walk-through and set up your gear.

Standing around waiting for someone to clean up a messy room, let alone having to do it yourself, is simply NOT in your job description. Or, if you want to offer such a service, you’d better charge extra for it!)

4. Be Careful Offering Deceptive Retouching or Photoshop.

This depends on where you’re doing business, of course, but in some areas/states, there are laws against real estate property being significantly misrepresented in photos.

It may be the real estate agent or company that gets in trouble, but you could still find yourself dragged into a huge time-wasting fiasco as the photographer. Also, if that client is in deep trouble, you could lose business.

How you respond to such requests is totally up to you as a professional, but, first and foremost you should educate yourself about the laws of your area. And, although it might be none of your business, if you sense that a client is simply not scrupulous, you might want to broach the subject with them.

5. Don’t Over-Process Your Images.

Even if your Photoshop retouching work is minimal, another cardinal sin of real estate photography is processing your images so over-the-top that the tones and colors themselves are not just unnatural, but unattractive.

Remember, photography is art, but it is also used as an accurate representation of reality. And any time you are picturing something that is for sale, whether a property or any other object, realistic representation should be balanced with “artistic liberty” a little bit differently than other forms of artistic photography.

Simply put, your goal is to render tones and colors relatively naturally. Leaning in the direction of “bright” and “warm” instead of dark, shadowy, and “cold” can help to make a room look more attractive, of course. Just try to keep your overall color-correction realistic and natural-looking.

If you do need to capture a bracketed sequence of a scene, be careful to not go too over-the-top with wild HDR processing. Lightroom’s built-in HDR merging feature gives the benefit of having a DNG file that you can “play with” without leaving your raw converter, however, for the maximum amount of smooth tonal control possible, we’ll usually use Photomatix with one of our more natural, neutral looking presets that allows us to process a scene brightly, and smooth-toned with just the right amount of contrast and clarity from dark shadows to bright highlights. That’s one of the major drawbacks of most raw conversion software, especially with extremely dynamic scenes: it can be difficult to manage contrast differently between highlights and shadows, whereas Photomatix is specifically designed for complete tonal control throughout the entire range of light.

6. Don’t Forget To Raise Your Prices!

Sure, everybody has to start somewhere. Your first job or two might have to be for a friend, for free, or for someone who just got their realtors’ license yesterday.

But, here’s the thing. Every photographer who enters this debate of, “how much should you charge for your first gig?” …often overlooks the most important step of the process: Getting your first few gigs under your belt is not the issue. However, AFTER you’ve shot your first few gigs, THEN your business pricing strategy becomes extremely important!

Many photographers get stuck in the rut of continuing to work for free, or charging way too little because they’re afraid of parting ways with those first few people who gave them a chance.

The absolute best thing you can do for your aspirations as a real estate photographer is, to charge a fair price as soon as you’re qualified. Yes, you’ll have to tell a few clients that you’re going to be charging more, but if your images are remotely good enough, the serious, respectful clients will see your value.

Then, the minute you have more work than you can handle in a week or a month, you know what that means? It means you have “too many” clients saying “yes” to your existing prices. It sounds like that couldn’t be a bad thing, but it is. Why? Because you could raise your prices a little bit, have a few clients say “no” but still have most of them say yes, and make equal or even more money by doing, well, less work!

Or, of course, if you’re already raising your prices and still having more clients trying to book you than you can handle, it might be time to consider bringing on a teammate who can help you accomplish some of the simpler jobs all by themselves, and help you on some of the bigger ones.

[Related Reading: Real Estate Photography Lighting Guide]

Conclusion

Thanks again to the folks at HDRsoft for sponsoring this content! We’re really enjoying being able to bring you these great, real-world tips and guides on real estate photography. Stay tuned for more coming soon.

In this article, we’ll list some of the best lenses for real estate, of course, but more importantly, we’ll make sure that you understand the factors that go into choosing a lens- what focal length, zoom range, and/or aperture range is right for which situation? Having this knowledge will be worth its weight in gold, (or just regular dollars!) because it will make the difference between average and truly high-quality work that your clients are willing to pay more for.

Thank you to Photomatix for sponsoring this tutorial series and making it possible. The tips given in this tutorial are based on professional experience by our full-time staff of photographers, and are our own opinions and advice!

The Right Focal Length For Real Estate Photography Subjects

For general work, from normal-sized property exteriors to decently spacious interior shots, you can probably photograph almost everything at around 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, or maybe 70mm or 85mm if there are distant or detail shots to be had. Thankfully, there are zoom lenses that can cover all of these focal lengths at once!

You’ll usually only need to go wider (16mm, 14mm, or 11mm!) for interior spaces that are very tight, where you’re forced to stand against a wall, and “fit in” as much of a room as possible.

Canon, Sony, Nikon, Sigma, Tamron, Tokina… What’s The Best Real Estate Lens?

The other question that a lot of photographers ask is, “what is the best Canon lens for real estate photography?” …or, “What is the best Nikon lens for real estate photography?” …and so on and so forth. Honestly? When it comes to the best lenses for real estate, thankfully, the brand name isn’t as important as what the lens is really offering you.

The fact is, you can find a great lens that fits almost any budget, on literally any brand of camera or lens mount. This is because real estate photographers don’t usually need extremely fast aperture lenses, or even extremely high-end autofocus sysems. The most important things are having the right focal length, having good overall image quality, and of course, long-term durability for working professionals.

If you can afford a budget of $600-1300, then almost every third-party lens will be attainable, and even some name-brand options, too. If you want an “exotic” name-brand lens, then some of the more modest ones may be as affordable as $1000-1300, but many of the best will be well over $2000.

A “Standard” Lens For Real Estate Photography

Before we start talking about the exciting, exotic wide-angle lenses that you might want to buy, let’s remember that no aspiring real estate photographer should go into business without covering the “normal” focal range first. So, make sure you cover the range of 24-70mm, or similar, before you do any other lens shopping.

Virtually all of the 24-70mm f/2.8 lenses from Canon, Nikon Sony, Sigma, Tamron, and Tokina are more than acceptable for real estate photography. In fact, the ones with an f/2.8 aperture and very beefy optics are probably a bit overkill!

So, if you already have a 24-70mm f/2.8, that’s great, however, if you don’t, then don’t hesitate to get a 24-70mm f/4, a 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5, a 24-105mm f/4, or 24-120mm f/4 type lens instead. You’ll be using smaller apertures much of the time, for depth of field, and lenses these days are very sharp when stopped down to those apertures, (say, f/8 to f/16) even if they aren’t giant, expensive, “flagship” lenses.

Zooms VS Primes For Real Estate Photos

One question you might have is, what about prime lenses? Of course, primes are great, and well-suited for things like portrait and candid photography where your shooting conditions allow for ample moving of both the camera and the subjects. However, with real estate, you are frequently constrained by where you can place your camera, while at the same time needing to capture an entire house or room within the angle of your lens.

So, can prime lenses work for real estate photography? Yes, absolutely. However, because zoom lenses are so sharp, affordable, and abundant these days, we simply don’t feel like we need to recommend any primes. Get yourself a mid-range zoom and a wide-angle zoom, and you’ll be good to go!

Wide Angle Lens For Real Estate Photography

Most experienced real estate photographers would argue that a wide-angle lens is the most important one for most types of work. However, the term “wide-angle” can be vague. In fact, it really means any focal length wider than about 35mm.

So, to answer the question, “what is the best wide-angle lens for real estate photography?” we must first consider the focal length or zoom range that you will actually use for the work you do. In other words, don’t make the mistake of just buying a lens because you heard it was very sharp; its focal range might not turn out to be best for your needs!

Are some of these lenses actually “better” than the others? Just barely. In fact, if you use a lens correction profile, which are automatically available in raw conversion/workflow software like Adobe Lightroom, and specialized software such as Photomatix, then you can enjoy near-perfect corrections for things like distortion and vignetting.

[Related Topic: How To Correct Lens Distortion In Real Estate Photography]

If you do this, then the playing field is very level, and your best choice is really whatever lens suits your budget and your focal length needs. For example, there is actually a huge difference between 14mm and 17mm, and the wider range can definitely help out for some real estate jobs, so we are listing these lenses in that order:

The Best Lens For Real Estate Photography | 14mm, 15mm, 16mm, & 17mm

These will probably be your bread-and-butter lens for real estate photography. In other words, invest heavily in one of these, save up for the best you can afford, and then worry about covering other focal lengths later! If you do real estate photography almost exclusively, then one of these lenses can honestly pay your bills.

Full-Frame Mirrorless Lenses Real Estate Photography Lenses

Nikon Z 14-30mm f/4 S ($1150)
(Read our in-depth review here!)

Nikon Z 14-24mm f/2.8 S ($2300)
(Read our in-depth review here!)

Canon RF 15-35mm f/2.8 L IS ($2100)
(Read our in-depth review here!)

Canon RF 14-35mm f/4 L IS ($1300)
(Read our complete review here!)

Canon RF 15-30mm f/4.5-6.3 IS STM ($550)
For those who are on a very tight budget, this is a very unique offering, against which other brands don’t offer much competition.

Panasonic 14-28mm f/2.8-5.6 Lumix S ($700)

Panasonic S Pro 16-35mm f/4 ($1000)

Sigma 14-24mm f/2.8 DG DN Art ($1230)
(For Sony & Panasonic/Sigma/Leica full-frame mirrorless)
(Read our complete review here!)

Tamron 17-28mm f/2.8 Di III RXD ($900)

Full-Frame DSLR Lenses For Real Estate Photography

Nikon F 14-24mm f/2.8 G ($1750)
(For Nikon DSLRs; this is the legendary first ultra-wide zoom to reach 14mm, and it still sets the bar very high, as one of the best lenses ever made!)

Sigma 14-24mm f/2.8 DG HSM Art ($1300)
(For Nikon & Canon DSLRs)

Tamron 15-30mm f/2.8 VC ($1220)
(For Canon & Nikon DSLRs; both the original and the G2 are both very good! Read our review here.)

Canon EF 16-35mm f/4 L IS ($750)

Best Lens For Interior Photography

Any wide-angle lens is great, but if you are going to be photographing a lot of interiors, especially small, cramped rooms such as bathrooms or small bedrooms or offices, then you can almost never have a wide enough lens! Of course a 14-24mm lens is still a great choice, but, there are also some 12-24mm lenses out there, and even some lenses that go to 11mm and 10mm. (None of these are fisheye lenses, either!)

Having such super-ultra-wide focal lengths at your disposal can be very helpful, however, they can also introduce significant perspective/scale distortion if you’re not careful, so be aware of any undesirable “stretching” effects at the edges of your images.

On the plus side, one advantage of having extremely wide focal lengths is that with a high-megapixel camera body, you can photograph a scene with the camera kept perfectly level, (so that all vertical lines remain vertical) …and then just crop in during post-production to achieve your actual desired composition.

The best wide-angle lenses (that reach 10mm, 11mm, or 12mm) for real estate photography

Sony FE 12-24mm f/4 G ($1773)

Sony FE 12-24mm f/2.8 GM ($2900)
(Read our full review here!)

Sigma 12-24mm f/4 HSM Art ($1000)
(For Canon & Nikon DSLRs)

Canon EF 11-24mm f/4 L ($3000)
(For Canon DSLRs)

Canon RF 10-20mm f/4 L IS STM ($2300)
(For Canon mirrorless RF (full frame) mount)

Laowa/Venus 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 FE ($700)
(For Sony E-mount, Nikon Z-mount, and Leica L-mount)

Best “Crop” APS-C & Micro Four Thirds Lenses For Real Estate

What about Fujifilm X, or the Sony A6700-type cameras, and all of the amazing Nikon and Canon APS-C (crop sensor) mirrorless cameras and DSLRs? They all make great cameras for real estate work! Especially since you’ll be doing a lot of work from a tripod with a low ISO, quite honestly APSC cameras and lenses offer a better value. The wide-angle lens selection used to be rather limited, however, that has changed completely in recent years.

Nikon and Canon APS-C DSLRs (1.5-1.6x crop) have two categories of great ultra-wide lenses. There are the lightweight, affordable 10-20mm or 10-18mm lenses, if you want very basic, no-frills options with an excellent value. For something slightly more high-quality and durable, there are numerous options by both name brands (and third-parties) in the 10-24mm range, or more exotic APS-C lenses like the Tokina 11-20mm f/2.8 ($450).

Nikon and Canon APS-C mirrorless (1.5-1.6x crop) For crop-sensor mirrorless users, Nikon offers the Nikkor Z DX 12-28mm f/3.5-5.6 PZ VR lens, which offers impressive image quality and costs a mere $356. Canon’s APS-C mirrorless RF-S mount offers an even tinier, similarly affordable 10-18mm f/4.5-6.3 IS STM, which again is a bargain and a decent performer. ($330)

On Sony’s E-Mount (1.5x crop), you have a similarly modest, portable (but, pricier) option, the 10-18mm f/4 OSS ($900), plus the possibility of adapting any DSLR lens you want. Third parties offer a few great options, our favorites being the Tokina 11-18mm f/2.8 ATX-M ($400), the Tamron 10-21mm f/2.8 ($700), and the Sigma 10-18mm f/2.8 DC DN. ($599)

On Fuji’s X-mount, (1.5x crop), the tried-and-true Fuji XF 10-24mm f/4 R OIS ($1000) is a solid performer at a decent price. If you have the budget to go truly exotic, the Fuji 8-16mm f/2.8 is even wider, though it will set you back between $1,3000 and $1,500, depending on the “instant savings”. Also, the same Tamron and Sigma ultra-wides are available on the X-mount, too.

On the Olympus/Panasonic Micro Four Thirds Mount, (2x crop), there are a handful of wide-angle options that take you to the equivalent of 14-16mm on full-frame, which is pretty respectable for such a compact system. Olympus’ flagship wide-angle lens, the Olympus ED 7-14mm f/2.8 PRO, (~$1200) is one of the widest possible choices.

Panasonic makes one of the most exotic ultra-wide lenses around, the 10-25mm f/1.7 ($1,500) with its unprecedented (for an ultra-wide zoom) f/1.7 constant aperture. Personally, though, we’d recommend the Panasonic 8-18mm f/2.8-4 instead, ($1,100) since it goes a bit wider, equivalent to 16mm full-frame.

Best Tilt-Shift Lenses For Real Estate Photography

For those photographers who really love “getting it right in-camera”, and who have the budget, you can consider a tilt-shift lens. These are specialty lenses that are made for exactly this type of photography, where keeping vertical lines vertical is a very common goal.

With a tilt-shift lens, you can aim the camera at your scene with the camera body perfectly level, and then raise or lower the lens optics independently to compose your image in an upward or downward direction. The result is a perfectly framed shot, without any of the vertical lines in your scene “leaning” in or out.

(NOTE: another bonus is this: Since most tilt-shift lenses are all-manual, their optics must be as flawless as possible, which means minimal lens distortion (pincushion, barrel, “mustache” distortion…) Also, since the image circle of a tilt-shift lens is significantly larger than the sensor it is projecting onto, vignetting is extremely minimal, too!

The question is, do you really need this type of lens for real estate photography? You can easily correct perspective in Lightroom, as we mentioned.  Sometimes all you have to do is just zoom out a little wider than your final composition, level the camera with the horizon to make vertical lines “behave normally”, …and then crop your final image upward or downward to get the intended final composition.

So, to be totally honest, a 12-24mm or similar ultra-wide zoom has just as much “perspective control” capability as a dedicated tilt-shift lens in the 24mm range, or maybe even in the 17-19mm range!

In short, no, a tilt-shift lens is not absolutely necessary. However, they can be a lot of fun to use if you’re into the technical aspects of perspective correction, and they really do save you lots of time in post-production. So, if you ever have the budget, do consider one. They are, of course, all prime lenses, and most of them are made for DSLRs, and are rather pricey:

Canon 17mm f/4 L TS-E (~$2150)

Nikon PC 19mm f/4 E (~$3400)

Canon 24mm f/3.5 L TS-E II (~$1900)

Nikon 24mm f/3.5 PC-E (~$2200) (discontinued, only available used!)

Rokinon/Samyang 24mm f/3.5 Tilt-Shift (~$700-800)

Venus/Laowa 20mm f/4 Zero-D Shift (~$1100)

Venus/Laowa 15mm f/4 Macro/Shift (~$500)
(This wide-angle lens offers shifting only, not tilt)

Venus/Laowa Magic Tilt-Shift Adapter ($300)
(This adapter, when combined with the Canon EF-mount Venus/Laowa 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D, creates a 17mm full-frame tilt-shift lens.)

FotodioX Pro TLT ROKR Tilt-Shift Adapter ($200+)
(For Canon/Nikon DSLR lenses, offers shifting capability through converting from full-frame to APS-C on the Sony E-mount or Fuji X-Mount. Many other mount conversions are possible, too!)

Fujifilm GF 30mm f/5.6 T/S (~$4,000)
For Fuji medium format (GFX) users, this exotic lens offers the equivalent of a 24mm focal length compared to full-frame sensors, and as you can imagine, the image quality is truly superb, doing justice to the mount’s 50 and 100-megapixel sensors!

Best Lens For Real Estate Photography | Conclusion

For additional equipment recommendations, check out our real estate photography gear article here. Another closely related article is this one about correcting lens distortion in real estate photography. Below is a complete list of articles on the subject of professional real estate photography:

Real Estate Photography Marketing Guide – How To Book More Jobs
How To Fix Lens Distortion In Real Estate Photos
A Step By Step Guide On How To Become A Real Estate Photographer
Ten Tips To Be Profitable In Real Estate Photography
Real Estate Photography Equipment Guide: Cameras, Lenses, Accessories & Software
HDR Versus Flash In Real Estate Photography
Real Estate Photography Lighting Guide
Six Common Real Estate Photography Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

Thanks again to the folks at Photomatix for sponsoring this content! We’re really enjoying being able to bring you these great, real-world tips and guides on real estate photography. Stay tuned for more coming soon.

In other words, the faster (and the better) you can edit and deliver your real estate photos, the happier both you and your clients will be! So, we’ve compiled a list of Lightroom tips just for your profession. These tips will help you work quickly, and also deliver high-quality photos!

Thank you to Photomatix for sponsoring this tutorial series and making it possible. The tips given in this tutorial are based on professional experience by our full-time staff of photographers, and are our own opinions and advice!

1. A Calibrated Display Is A Must-Have

Before we import our photos into Lightroom and start processing, we need to set the foundation for viewing our images correctly. This requires a display that has been calibrated to deliver accurate colors and contrast.

You might think your images look okay, because most monitors do appear decently neutral in terms of color balance, and have great contrast and saturation right out of the box. However, you’d be surprised how much an un-calibrated monitor can deviate from accurate. An image may look correct on your screen, but in reality, the display is making its colors, contrast, or overall brightness appear significantly different from what they’ll look like in print or on other people’s displays.

Your calibration device doesn’t have to be the most expensive one on the market; any of the popular ones will work well. Just make sure the new display profile is still in place when you wake up or restart your computer; in some rare circumstances, the calibration profile can default back to the factory setting.

2. Keep The Culling Process Simple & Quick

Okay, it’s time to import all the photos, and separate the keepers from the rejects. Personally, we have some tricks that seem to work well for sorting real estate photos at maximum speed.

First, don’t over-complicate the culling process. But, do utilize whatever culling tools you need to help you work quickly! For example, start with all photos completely un-flagged, and when culling, just hit “P” to flag a photo as a keeper, or a Pick.

If you have any sets of photos that need to be merged to HDR, you could additionally flag them with a red label by hitting “6”. If you have any photos that need advanced retouching in Photoshop, maybe use a yellow label by hitting “7”.

Then, when you’re done flagging all your keepers, just use your filters to select all the un-flagged photos, and mark them as “rejects” all at once by hitting “X”.

3. Over-Edited Photos Can Look Unprofessional

Next, it’s (almost) time to actually color-correct your photos. First, let’s ask ourselves: what “looks good” for real estate photos in particular? This question is particularly important to anyone who is just starting out and delivering their very first few jobs.

At first, it can be very easy to overdo it with editing. So, always be careful when cranking up the Contrast, Saturation, or Dehaze/Clarity sliders too far! They can be helpful if an image is truly “flat” to begin with, however, most scenes with good contrast and color shouldn’t need too much extra attention besides a little bit of tonal management, and white balance fine-tuning.

Honestly, if you’ve dialed any of these Basic sliders to +20-30 or higher, then try sliding them back halfway. Then, look away from the image for just a few seconds, and look at the it again to see if it still looks good to your eyes. You might actually like the slightly less-edited version! (Or, you might dial certain sliders back up a little bit, of course.)

Everyone has different styles and preferences, and your clients may be expecting a certain look. If you’re already very familiar with Lightroom, and have a lot of experience making images still look good with ample contrast and vibrant colors, then that’s great! This word of caution is aimed more at anyone who is still unsure about whether or not they’ve gone “over the top”. When in doubt, dial it back just a little bit.

As a general rule, many real estate agents and market areas in general will, indeed, prefer images to be processed on the brighter and ever-so-slightly warmer side. Why? Because it makes a home seem very inviting, welcoming, to potential buyers!

4. Use Lightroom Presets To Quickly Start Every Scene

To save time in the color-correction process, real estate is one type of photography that can benefit from presets, in at least a small way. Most real estate photography jobs will involve shooting a bunch of photos from just a few rooms or outside angles. What this means is, a lot of your images will receive nearly identical edits, and eventually you might even begin to encounter similar conditions from job to job.

So, if you frequently find yourself performing a few very similar adjustments, try creating a preset that is the approximate average of those common adjustments. Whether it’s for a type of room, decor, or even a type of lightbulb, any time you find yourself always doing the same adjustments to more than just one or two sliders, try making a preset for those sliders, (Of course, un-check all other boxes for the other settings, so your preset doesn’t mess up anything you don’t want it to!)

You might find that from one job to the next, some presets you created work well, while others need fine-tuning, or some just aren’t useful at all. It’s a learning process!

Also, you can update your Adobe defaults to reflect your own personal preferences for the more technical, under-the-hood settings like sharpening, lens profile corrections, or custom color calibration for your camera, if there is a tint in the shadows or something.

PRO TIP: If you’ve started a preset and you want to fine-tune it, right-click it and select “Update With Current Settings”, then check or un-check whichever boxes of the settings you want that preset to change, and click “update”!

5. Use Auto-Sync To Edit Entire Scenes At Once

Some photographers don’t like to use presets, and that’s fine! However, one thing you’ll absolutely want to take advantage of is Lightroom’s OTHER tool to help you avoid doing the same edits more than once. That tool is, Auto Sync.

If you’re editing a handful of images from the same angle, or in the same room with the same light, contrast, and overall exposures, then you should get in the habit of selecting all of the photos from that scene and turning on Auto Sync before you start editing.

With Auto Sync on, you can edit the primary selected photo, and Lightroom will match each adjustment for all the other selected photos.

Then, all you have to do is just deselect the additional photos, and briefly go through them one at a time. Hopefully, you will only need to make faint, quick adjustments to the brightness or contrast!

PRO TIP: In case you didn’t notice, you can just hover your mouse over any adjustment slider in the Develop Module, and use the “Up” and “Down” keys to quickly adjust that slider. Shift-click Up/Down for even bigger “bumps” to the sliders!

6. A Crash Course In Lightroom Tone Management

How do you actually edit real estate photos to look good? Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of how we actually edit the tones in our images. Of course, there are many ways to accomplish basic post-production, but here is our preferred method… (Remember, our general goal for most real estate jobs is natural, brightly processed images, with neutral or slightly warm overall colors.)

Think of Lightroom’s basic  tonal adjustments in four categories:

1.) Exposure/Contrast
2.) The four other tone sliders (Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks)
3.) The three “Presence” (micro-contrast) sliders
4.) Tone Curves (Point and Parametric)

When editing an image, especially tricky ones with some serious dynamic range, start by dialing your exposure up or down to set the overall starting point for your other adjustments. The goal is to get the image to a place where the rest of your adjustments can be as balanced as possible. This is also the time to make a rough white balance adjustment, if it’s way off.

You can actually leave Contrast alone for now, or, if you do adjust it, remember to come back to it later once you’ve finished managing your major shadow & highlight tones:

Second, the heavy lifting of “tonal management” is easily done with the Highlights and Shadows sliders of the Basic panel, followed by the Whites and Blacks sliders if you need to fine-tune any tones that are either clipped or almost clipped:

After these adjustments, your image’s overall tones from near-white to near-black should all be falling into place. No totally blown highlight areas, and no large areas of deep, dark shadow:

At this point, you can go back to double-check your white balance, and then focus on overall contrast, before we take the next step into more complex contrast adjustments to give your image that final “pop”.

To enhance what is sometimes called “micro-contrast”, the Texture and Clarity sliders affect very small and medium-small detail contrast, respectively. Be careful, though, because raising these sliders too high can add too much “grit” to your images, making clean surfaces look “dirty”, which is never a good thing for real estate:

On a larger scale of contrast, the Dehaze slider can be very dynamic. However, it affects certain tones and colors very differently, so although it may be tempting to go nuts with it on every image, it usually works best on images that actually have some amount of haze or low contrast in them.

Tone Curves In Lightroom

Last but not least, for the largest, most powerful contrast adjustments, you have two options: you can go back to the main Contrast slider again, for a very basic, crude adjustment, OR, you can use the Curves panel to adjust contrast in a more precise way, such as only affecting a certain tonal range. (For example, maybe you want to increase contrast in a certain range of shadow tones, and yet leave all other tones alone.)

Point Curve adjustments are usually rather dramatic, while Parametric Curve adjustments are more user-friendly and smooth, but can affect color in weird ways. So, again, use these adjustments lightly, and don’t feel compelled to use every single one of them!

Here’s the thing you should remember as a real estate photographer who needs to get jobs edited and delivered as quickly as possible: Yes, there are 2-4 different ways to accomplish almost the exact same goal, but that doesn’t mean you have to use every single tool on every single photo. Many times, all you need to do is, manage your overall exposure, perform some highlight/shadow recovery, (or create an HDR image for maximum highlight/shadow recovery) …and then finish it off by applying a little bit of contrast without severely clipping anything.

7. Use Plug-ins For Even More Streamlined Lightroom Automation

In real estate photography, automating repetitive processes can be a huge time-saver. In fact, on many types of smaller jobs it can make or break your profit margins as a working pro!

For example, oftentimes the best habit is to just bracket exposures for almost an entire job! But then, processing these images should not, indeed cannot, be a “one-at-a-time” type of process, it needs to be automated.

Lightroom now has built-in HDR merging, thankfully, and with one of the most recent updates to (Classic) CC, you can even merge images to HDR (DNG files) in batches. Simply create Stacks of all your bracketed sequences, select all the stacks, right-click one of them, and select “Photo Merge -> HDR”. (Or, hit CTRL/CMD+H)

Lightroom won’t give you any options for how to blend the tones of each image, or ghosting/alignment options, but at least it will merge bracketed exposures together into a single DNG file in one simple step.

If you’d like to have greater control over the HDR merging process, then external HDR merging software such as Photomatix will offer that, even in tandem with batch processing functionality without interrupting your Lightroom workflow.

(NOTE: Thankfully, the days of having to install an external Lightroom plugin separately are mostly over! External editors usually automatically install their necessary Lightroom plugins for you.)

The Photomatix HDR Batch Plugin for Lightroom is a particularly useful plugin for real estate photography. With the HDR Batch Plugin, you can create HDR images in batches, while selecting more in-depth blending methods (fusion, tone balancer, detail enhancer, etc.) or select from specialized real estate presets, make personal adjustments, …and then Photomatix will batch create TIF files that show up in Lightroom.

One additional benefit of using an advanced HDR batch processing application is, with Photomatix you don’t need to create Stacks for every single bracketed sequence. If they’re all in sets of the same number of raw original images, you can instruct Photomatix to simply treat sets of 3 (or 5, or however many) images as bracketed sets. Again, saving a few minutes of time can really add up!

Lastly, you can save new presets based on your own preferences, for future jobs that have similar lighting conditions.

8. Before Exporting, Take A Break And Then Come Back

So, you raced through all your images at record speed, and you’re ready to export them and send them off to your client, right? Wait a minute! No, seriously, just wait a minute…

If you’ve been staring at your computer screen for an hour or more, your eyeballs need a bit of what we call a palette cleanser. Get up, take a quick break, go walk your dogs, make a sandwich, do anything besides staring at your screen, for 5-10 minutes. (So, watching TV or checking your phone doesn’t count!)

Then, come back to your computer, and re-check your images in Lightroom’s Grid Mode. It might seem weird, but this is the best way to catch slight mistakes to your images’ overall lightness or white balance! If you’re still getting the hang of color-correction, you’ll often be shocked at how obvious a slight magenta or green tint is, that you totally didn’t see before.

If you look at a whole collection of images as thumbnails, (usually 6-8 images wide, not too small!) it becomes evident when either a single image, or the whole set collectively is off, whether things are slightly too bright/dark, or too warm/cool.

Personally, I take it one step further, and I either undo any color labels I might have used, (because I feel like a green or red label might bias my eyes a little bit when trying to detect any faint Tint or Temp errors) …or, just hit “L” a couple of times until you get the all-black “dim the lights” mode in Lightroom.

9. Use Quick-Develop To Adjust Warmth And Brightness In The Library Module

Okay, so, your photos are all edited. Maybe even exported and delivered! But, have you ever had a client say, “these photos look great, but I wish they were all a little brighter/warmer”?

Or, maybe you actually used our last tip, and you caught your own mistake before exporting. Good job! Either way, it can be frustrating to need to revisit every single photo…

Well, there’s some really good news- you don’t have to go back into the Develop Module and individually correct every single image one at a time! You can use the Library Module instead, and do it all at once. Just select all the photos, turn on Auto-Sync, (visible in the Loupe Mode of the Library Module, but not in Grid Mode) and use the Quick Develop adjustments to “bump” your main image’s exposure, white balance, or contrast… Here’s the cool part: Instead of forcing all your selected images to exactly match the settings of that one image, Quick Develop works differently- it changes each image by the same amount, without totally synchronizing the final position of the slider!

In case you’re wondering, in Quick Develop, the single arrow makes smaller adjustments, (1/3 EV for exposure) and the double arrow makes larger adjustments. (1 whole EV for exposure)

10. Create Export Presets For High-Res and Low-Res Output

After every keeper image is fully color-corrected and ready to be exported and delivered, there is one last way you can save a bit of time: create export presets for your most common export needs.

For example, we like to deliver images in both high-res and low-res JPG formats, for clients’ convenience. Web-resolution images, by default, are exported at 2048 pixels long for web use, and at around 20 megapixels (5500 pixels long) for print or other high-res use.

Your needs may vary! Some clients might think that 10-megapixel images are “high-res”, and other clients might need your whole 40-60 megapixel files! Of course, it is therefore very important to communicate with your clients about what their final use of the images will be.

If the images are only going to be used in online property listings, you might want to adjust your low-res export resolution to however many pixels they need, whether it is just 1000 pixels on the long end, or 2000 pixels, etc. This way, your client won’t have to worry about uploading 40+ megapixel images just for an online listing! Of course, you can also export a folder of high-res images for the client too, if they want them for their own archival purposes.

Lastly, if you have repeat clients with different needs, for their own websites or the listing sites they use, then you might create an export preset for just that one client if they want 800-pixel or 1200-pixel wide images specifically.

Conclusion

Do you have any other questions about Lightroom and the post-production of real estate photography? Leave a comment below! Hopefully these tips will help get you up and running with an efficient, high-quality Lightroom workflow for your real estate photography.

For additional equipment recommendations, Be sure to check out our complete guides below:

10 Lightroom Tips For Real Estate Photography
Real Estate Photography Marketing Guide – How To Book More Jobs
How To Fix Lens Distortion In Real Estate Photos
A Step By Step Guide On How To Become A Real Estate Photographer
Ten Tips To Be Profitable In Real Estate Photography
Real Estate Photography Equipment Guide: Cameras, Lenses, Accessories & Software
HDR Versus Flash In Real Estate Photography
Real Estate Photography Lighting Guide
Six Common Real Estate Photography Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

Thanks again to Photomatix for sponsoring this content. We’ve been using their software for over ten years and appreciate the efficiency and versatility, whenever we need to create HDR images.