Real Estate Photography Basics, by Mike Burke

Hey everyone, my name is Mike Burke with Inside Real Estate Photography and in this video we’re going to discuss the fundamental principles of real estate photography in addition to the gear you’ll need, advice on how to set up your camera, and basic techniques on how to shoot and edit your images.

So the idea behind this video is to outline the foundational concepts that are essential to shooting real estate photography, and also what I think is the most basic way to shoot using the least amount of gear possible.

We’re essentially talking about a camera, a tripod, and shooting bracketed shots without using any lights or extraneous gear. I will get into using lights and other techniques in future videos, but for this video I want to focus on the most simplistic approach possible.

So who is this video for? This video will serve as a great guide for anyone who is just starting out or looking to get into real estate photography as it covers the essentials and also an approach to shooting that doesn’t require investing in a whole bunch of equipment straight out of the gate.

Additionally, this video could be helpful to any photographers out there who are maybe just looking to streamline their workflow. The information outlined in this video will be all you really need to know to be a working real estate photographer.

As I mentioned, you can certainly get more advanced in this if you want to, but you definitely don’t have to. You could build a full -time business in the manner I’m about to lay out and absolutely be successful.

It really just depends on what you’re going for, and if you are interested in exploring other methods in the future, this information will still serve as a great foundation for you to build from. I built a full -time real estate photography business in this manner, so believe me when I say that it’s a proven method.

Okay, so let’s talk about gear. The camera I’m using is the Sony a7 III which is a full -frame camera. If you are looking to go to the full -frame route, I love my a7 III and I highly recommend it. The main reason being, it’s great at shooting both photos and videos.

It’s a great, compact, all in one solution. You can certainly shoot real estate photos on a crop sensor camera, especially on a especially if you’re just starting out and maybe on a tighter budget. When I myself first started shooting, I did so on a crop sensor camera.

In the Sony world this would be something in the A6000 series like the A6400 or the A6600. Whatever camera you do decide to go with, I highly recommend it have an articulating screen because if you’re bending down to look at your screen all day, trust me when I say you’re going to be hating life.

Now let’s talk about lenses. I’m personally using the Sony 16 -35 f2 .8 lens. If you are shooting full frame, I do highly recommend the 16 -35mm focal range as it’s wide but not too wide and also the 35mm end is nice for tighter shots.

Every major camera brand that I know of has the 16 -35mm lens in their full frame line up so you should be able to find one for your camera brand. I did a whole video on camera lenses for real estate photography and I’ll link to that up on the screen now.

If you are shooting crop sensor then I’d recommend the Sony 10 -18mm lens or something in a similar focal range for your brand of camera. You could of course use a prime, but I just feel zooms are more versatile for our line of work.

If you are using a prime, you’ll have to move your tripod around to compose your shots which will slow you down and get annoying really fast. Now let’s discuss tripods. There are a lot of fancy tripods out there, but in my humble opinion you don’t need anything that fancy.

I mean you don’t want to be buying a flimsy piece of crap, but you don’t need to be spending $1000 on a carbon fiber tripod either. You just need something stable that has a half decent build quality.

I am using this $100 Slick 700DX tripod. Nothing crazy. Why this particular one? Because it is a very long center post. Most tripods don’t have a center post that long. This is great because it gives me a lot of range to adjust my camera height before I have to resort to adjusting the tripod legs which is really annoying and takes up a lot of time.

I am all about anything that makes my job faster and allows for more efficient use of my time. Also this tripod is very sturdy and reliable. I’ve been beating the hell out of this one for years and it’s still going strong.

Ok, so let’s talk about tripod heads. Personally I am using this thing called the No -Dial Ninja Easy Leveler which sits between your tripod legs and your tripod head. The purpose of this is so you can easily and precisely level your tripod head by turning the three wheels around it.

So as far as the actual tripod head that goes on top, it really doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s halfway decent and has an accurate bubble level that you can easily see when you’re looking down.

I use this Benro S6 head which is actually a video head which you can come in handy if you’re shooting a real estate video and need to do any fluid pans or tilts. So a lot of real estate photographers instead go with what’s called a geared head such as a Benro GD3WH which eliminates the need for the easy leveler that I mentioned because you can make precise leveling adjustments by using the knobs on the head.

Both of these approaches are equally good and are just two different ways to achieve the same result so it’s just a matter of which way you want to go. I personally prefer my approach because I think it’s more versatile because it allows put whatever tripod head you want on top if you wanted to use it for something like video work as I mentioned.

You’re not going to be doing any video pans with a geared head, but if you don’t care about that then it’s a great option. So the last little piece of gear I want to mention is a remote shutter trigger for your camera.

We’re going to be shooting bracketed photos or multiple exposures of the same image that will be blended together later in post, so we want to avoid pressing the shutter button on the camera as it may move the camera slightly and our bracketed photos won’t line up perfectly when we go to edit them.

Yes, you can align the photos later in editing if you have to if they’re a little off, but this just eliminates the need to worry about that and saves you time in editing. I use these cheap little remotes by this company called Photo and Tech.

They work great and I definitely recommend buying multiple of them because you will lose them a lot, accidentally put them in the washing machine, and drop them in people’s pools. Yes, I’ve done all those things multiple times.

Ok, so that about covers the gear. Not too bad right? Just your camera, lens, tripod, and tripod head with some sort of leveling capability. If you are interested in any of the gear I mentioned, I will link to it down in the description below.

Alright, now let’s get into camera settings. Okay, so now we’re going to set up our camera to shoot real estate photos. The first thing we’re going to do is put our camera in aperture priority mode and set our aperture to f8.

We’re using f8 because we want a large depth of field and we want everything in our frame to be in focus. Also, most lenses are typically pretty sharp at f8. Since we are shooting in aperture priority mode, the camera can then calculate shutter speed on its own, saving us time from having to dial it in manually from shot to shot.

Since we’re shooting on a tripod, we don’t have to worry about what the shutter speed is because the camera will be completely still the entire time. One thing we do have to watch out for though is the exposure compensation dial, as it will be active in aperture priority mode and it will affect your exposure.

Just leave it set to zero unless you want to adjust your exposure a little bit. Lastly, concerning exposure, we’re going to set our ISO to 100 in order to capture the cleanest image possible. Sometimes I’ll bump it up to 400 if I need to speed things up a little bit and there’s hardly any perceptible difference between the two.

Next we’re going to go into the camera menu and set the camera to shoot JPEGs. You could certainly shoot raw bracketed images if you so choose, but I find JPEGs to be sufficient and we’re going to be going that route for this demonstration.

For detail, we want to set it on extra fine to get the most detailed image possible and for size we want to set it on large in order to capture the full 24 megapixel image. If you have a high megapixel camera like something from the Sony a7r series, you may want to set this on a lower setting so you’re not working with gigantic files.

All real estate photos end up online anyway, so they don’t need to be huge. Now we’re going to set the drive mode or how we want the camera to go about shooting photos. As I mentioned, we’re going to be shooting bracketed photos that will be later blended together in the editing process.

So we want to set the drive mode to continuous bracket, two stops apart, five frames. So now when I go to take a photo, the camera is going to automatically fire off five JPEG photos exposed two stops apart.

This way we’re capturing the photos. a wide range of detail throughout the shadows and highlights, so when we composite these frames later together in editing, we’re going to end up with one highly detailed photo.

Next we want to make sure our camera is set on autofocus, and I’m going to put my autofocus setting on wide. The wide setting will work 98% of the time. If you’re in a certain situation where you find it’s not working for you, you may want to set it on something more focused like single point or zone.

For white balance, I have my camera set to auto white balance. For the Sony cameras like I’m using, I feel they do a pretty good job with auto white balance, but if you find your camera struggling, you may want to set it manually.

I will set it manually in certain situations when I feel like the camera isn’t getting it right. Okay, so just a few more things. First I want to make sure my camera is set up to communicate with my remote control.

If you are using a Sony camera and these little remotes that I mentioned, you have to go into the camera settings to IR remote control and set it to on in order for the camera to receive the infrared signal from the remote.

Another thing I suggest doing is turning off steady shot or in -body image stabilization if your camera has it. For one, we’re shooting on a tripod so it’s completely unnecessary. And also, sometimes I found my brackets wouldn’t line up correctly when it was on, because the camera decided to move the sensor around during my shot thinking it needed to stabilize the image for some reason.

The last two things we need to do is to display our in -camera level, and I like to put my rule of thirds grid on because it helps me compose my shots sometimes. Alright, now that we have all our gear in order and all our camera settings taken care of, let’s talk about shooting.

So before we get into shooting any rooms, I want to talk about a few general things first. First thing being camera height. For interior photos, I have my camera on my tripod at about waist height. Why?

Because I want the right balance of floor and ceiling in my shot. If I’m shooting at eye level, I’ll have too much ceiling in my shot, and conversely, if I’m shooting too low, I’ll have too much floor in my shot.

I find that waist height is usually the sweet spot for most homes. If the home has really high ceilings, then you may want to raise it up a little bit. There are some instances where I would deviate, like if there’s a piece of furniture blocking my shot, or in certain rooms like kitchens where I want to raise the camera up high enough so I’m not seeing the underneath of the cabinets, which aren’t attractive, and also so we can see the countertops.

So it really depends on the situation and the room, but unless there’s a reason to raise the camera, I’m keeping it at waist height for interior photos. I always provide a wide shot for every room. All agents want the wide shot to show how big a room is.

Whether or not the room requires any detail or tighter, more composed shots is a case -by -case basis and up -to -year discretion. So for main rooms such as living rooms, dining rooms, etc., I get a minimum of two angles.

Typically one from one corner and the other from the opposite opposing corner. This way you’re showing the entire room and any other rooms that connect to it. Shooting from the corner of the room, or better yet, outside of the room shooting from the entrance, will make the room look the largest.

From a compositional standpoint though, having some one -point perspective shots in there are a nice touch. They won’t make the room look as big, but they’re nice looking shots and it’s nice to have some variety.

The kitchen gets the most shots. I get at least four angles of the kitchen, one from each corner of the room if possible. I’ll even get a couple additional shots of the kitchen usually, if it calls for it.

For most bedrooms and bathrooms, I typically just get one wide shut up from the doorway, unless there’s something really nice in there that you wanna show off, like nice tile in the shower or something.

For the master bedroom, I usually get more than one angle of that, and also for the master bathroom if it warrants it. For the exterior shots of the house, I’m fully extending my tripod legs and shooting at about eye level.

There’s no more ceiling and houses are tall, so I wanna be shooting as high as possible. I’ll get three composed shots of the front of the house, one off to the left, one in the center, and then one off to the right.

And I’ll also get a shot of the entrance of the house and another wide shot from the street to show how big the front yard and property is. For the back of the house, I usually do two wide shots from each corner of the backyard, facing away from the house to show how big the backyard is.

I’ll then do a shot of the back of the house, and then any features of the backyards, such as patios, pools, or decks, and so forth. Okay, so now that I gave you an overview of my shooting process, let’s go around my house and I’ll demonstrate a few shots.

All right guys, so here we are in my living room. I’m sorry it’s not more spectacular, but actually this is probably a good thing because most of the homes we’re probably gonna be shooting are pretty average homes, not multi -million dollar homes.

So this will be more representative of the kind of houses that we’re shooting on a daily basis. So hey, it works. So the first thing I do before I shoot a room is I just take a once over around the room, make sure that the pillows are in order, the curtains are straight, the blinds are how I like it, and that there’s no clutter around.

We usually prep our clients before we come to the house to shoot and make sure that they clean the place up and that it’s tidy theoretically. Not all the time does that happen, unfortunately, but that’s a very important thing to do and I’ll probably get into that in a future video.

As I said, I’m gonna shoot from the corner usually to get a wide shot. I always get a wide shot of the room, as I mentioned, because the agent or client always wants the wide shot. You can get tighter shots as well, but I always like to get the wide shot so they have it.

It’s better to have it than not have it, so I definitely highly recommend getting it always. That’s my philosophy. Ideally, I like to shoot from a doorway, like over here, being outside of the room a little bit, but the way this room is oriented, I kinda need to be in the room so I can point my camera more at an angle to capture this room properly.

So our camera’s roughly in position here and it’s at waist height, so we have the proper balance of floor and ceiling in our shot, as I was talking about earlier, and now we need to compose our shot.

So I’m going to just start moving my camera around until I see a composition that I like. So I have the TV over here and the picture frame over here. It kinda is a nice you balance on both sides to frame up our shot.

Once we have our composition set, the next thing we want to do is level our camera. So this is very, very important step. The first thing we want to do is level our tripod head and then we’re going to level the tilt axis.

But it’s very important that we level the tripod head first before the tilt axis. If you do it the other way around, it will not be right. So you want to make sure you always level the head first. And we do that with our leveler here as I showed you before by turning these knobs and looking at the bubble level on the head until it’s perfectly in the middle.

We just turn and turn and turn. All right, that’s great. That’s perfect. Now the vertical level we do by just tilting the camera up and down. We have our in -camera level on. As I mentioned, I can only speak for Sony, but I can tell you that the in -camera level sucks.

So you cannot trust it. What I usually do is use something in the room like the trim around a door or the trim around a window because I know that. It’s theoretically level and even if it’s not we want those things to look straight.

We want our vertical lines to be perfectly straight up and down. This is a very important step in real estate photography. If your camera is tilted at all, your lines will be skewed. Your vertical lines will be skewed one way or the other and it’ll look funny and distorted and we don’t want that.

I’m going to turn my camera this way a little bit until I catch the edge of the guide and just tilt my camera until the door trim is perfectly straight against the edge of my frame that I’m seeing on my screen.

So that’s perfect. Now I can turn my camera back until I have the composition that I had earlier that I liked. Now we’re ready to fire off our shot. So I’m going to got my remote here. I’m going to hit the two second button, which gives the camera an opportunity to focus before shooting.

If you just hit the shutter button, it’ll just fire right off the bat without focusing and you will get out of focus shots. So you want to make sure you hit the two second button on these remotes that I’m using at least.

And here we go. So obviously I would get more than one angle of this room. As I said, I like to get opposite angles. So there’s a big sectional couch here. So unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to get that opposite corner.

I’m going to do one shot here and then, you know, one shot in a couple of other rooms. I’m not going to do a full shoot here. I’ll do a full shoot video in the future for sure. But this is just sort of showing you how I do it and giving you an introduction to it.

So now let’s go on to the next room. All right. So here we are in the kitchen. Now the kitchen, as I mentioned, is one of the rooms where I would deviate on the height of my camera. So that we don’t want to see much of the underneath the cabinets.

And we also want to see the cabinet. countertops. So about waist level here is not going to cut it. As you can see, you know, we’re seeing all the side of the cabinets. We’re not seeing much of the countertops from this height.

So that’s not really going to do it for us. So the kitchen is the highest. I’ll have my camera for any interior shot because of the cabinets and everything. It needs to be pretty high. So this is where this nice long center post comes in on this tripod because I can go from waist height to chest height without adjusting the tripod legs.

And that is a huge time saver. Typically I’ll shoot at about chest height for the kitchen. That seems to be usually sufficient. So I’ll just raise my center column all the way up and I’m about chest height now.

And as you can see through the camera, we’re not seeing much of the underneath, maybe a little bit on the left. But the underneath of the cabinet is over here on the left is not obvious. So it’s not a big deal.

I got my shot composed of how I want it. The first thing we want to do is level our tripod head. So I’m going to use my leveler here turn the knobs Until my bubble level is level on my tripod head Once we have that straight now, I want to vertically level my camera by you know tilting it up and down Again, we’re gonna use the in -camera level as a rough guide But as I mentioned it sucks so we’re not trusting it You know, I always use something in the room like here I’m gonna zoom in towards the window frame The trim of the window.

I know that’s pretty much level. So if I zoom in a little bit and use the left side of my frame Against that I can see that my verticals are perfectly up and down and that’s really it my shots ready to go So I’m gonna press the two second button on my remote so it focuses and then fires off the shots Alright guys, so here we are in the bathroom again as I mentioned earlier This is a room that I would typically get just one wide shot of from the doorway So I have my tripod here positioned about Halfway between the door jam here, you know, I’m standing outside of the room that way I can get the widest shot I can possibly get and show everything I can in the bathroom Usually bathrooms are pretty tight spaces So, you know, you really want to try to squeeze out every inch you can this is also a room where I would deviate from having my camera at waist height because we have the Sink here and we’re not gonna want to shoot too low otherwise, we’re not gonna see the top of the sink and You know, we’re gonna get all the front and it’s gonna look a little odd I’m gonna raise my camera up until I can see the top of the sink here Right about there, you can see how much better that looks when you can see the top of the sink So the problem with this position is if you notice the top right corner of the sink frame.

You see how stretched out the mirror looks. The top corner of it is very stretched and exaggerated. I always try to avoid that at all costs because you know we don’t want to see distortion in our picture.

So our other option would be to cut part of the mirror off and shoot more straight on towards the shower somewhere right here. So we’re getting the whole faucet in. Cutting part of the mirror off. It’s still a little stretched on the top corner there.

But maybe a little less exaggerated. Sometimes when you’re in these scenarios there’s really nothing you could do about it. You just got to pick the lesser of two evils. We’ll go with this. And yes we had part of the door in the shot.

And bathrooms are really the only room that I’ll get part of the door in like this because again they’re tight spaces so I’m just trying to get the whole thing in here. Now of course, like we did before, the first thing we want to do is level our tripod.

So make sure our bubble level is level on our tripod head and then we want to vertically level our camera again. So we’re looking pretty good. On our vertical level, our horse sound level is good, our composition is good.

I’m going to fire this shot off. So I got my remote and I’m going to hit my two second button. And there we go. Alright, so finally here we are in a bedroom. This is my son’s bedroom. Just to show you a bedroom shot.

These bedroom shots are typically the easiest ones to get, to be honest with you. Pretty straightforward. Like I said, I usually just get one wide shot from the doorway. So I’m completely out of the room.

My tripod is maybe halfway through the door frame and that way we can get a wide shot of the whole room to show how big the bedroom can be. Of course, if there’s things like there’s a crib in here, so that might encroach on our shot a little bit, but we’ll see how that goes.

So I got my camera at waist height as usual and I’m just going to play around here and see what my composition is looking like. So when I’m this far back, you know, this crib here, if this crib wasn’t here, I can get even a wider shot, but it’s really sticking in the edge of my frame here.

So I kind of want to like crop that out. So I’m kind of just going to move my camera a little bit further in until the crib is out of my shot. So once I have that cropped out, I basically have the composition now that I like.

And as we’ve done previously, we’re going to level our tripod head first. So I’m going to turn my little dials on the level, leveler. And so my head is level. Now I’m going to level my verticals. I can use the door.

I have that. I recomposed my shot and make sure it’s how I had it composed before. I’m happy with that. It looks good. And we’re ready to take our shot. Pretty straightforward, nice, easy, quick. Alright guys, so that’s all the rooms we’re going to shoot for this video.

I just wanted to cover the main different scenarios that you come across shooting a house, like a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, a main room, like a living room. In a future video, I’ll take you through a full shoot, but in this video, I just wanted to give you an introduction on the different rooms that you come across shooting a house and how to address those situations.

Alright, now that we have our images shot. Let’s take them to editing. Alright, so now I’m going to take you through the process of editing these example images we just shot. In keeping with the theme of this video, we’re going to take a basic approach to editing here, meaning we’re going to do an HDR merge inside Lightroom and edit from there.

There are more advanced ways of doing manual exposure blending, which is more time consuming and more advanced, and that’s really a topic for another video. But for this, we’re just going to keep it simple and straightforward.

So let’s get into it. Alright guys, so here we are in Lightroom. I’ve imported all our bracketed images here, as you see. And the first thing I’m going to do is just command A and select all these images, and I want to group these into stacks.

So I’m going to control click, or you can right click if you’re on a PC. I’m going to go to stacking, and then I want to go to auto stack by capture time. I have it set to five seconds. It says four stacks, zero on stacked, meaning that we have four stacks, which we do have four images that we took here, and it will stack them according to the time they were shot since we did an eight bracketed HDR shot.

It was shot in a few seconds, so it knows that those images belong together in a stack. I’ll hit stack here, and you’ll see it puts them into four stacks. We have our four images here. And the next thing we need to do is merge these into one HDR image.

So you can do an HDR merge inside Lightroom. You have all the stacks selected. You go to control click and go down to photo merge, and then HDR, and then it will merge them. However, I do not like the way Lightroom merges photos.

It does not look good to me. I don’t like the results very much. There’s a plugin out there called Infuse that I think does a much better job of it. I’ll put the link to it in the description. It’s a donation based thing, so you You can pay $5, whatever you want for it.

So it’s not cost prohibitive. So I highly recommend getting that because it does a much better job. And how you access that once you install it, I’m going to go to File and then go to Plugin Extras and you’ll see LR Infuse.

So Blend Exposures using LR Infuse. I’m going to select that. Yeah, I’m really using basically the default settings here. The only thing I changed was a couple things here. So I have Batch Mode, Blend All Stacks here selected, Create Blended Images in the same folder selected, and then I have Append and HDR.

So the new file that it creates will have the text HDR file name at the end of the file name. So I did that so it’s easy for me to sort them out. I’ve re -imported into Lightroom selected and stack with originals.

So that’s really, this is the only page I really change anything on. So I’m just going to hit infuse image and it will infuse the images over the next couple minutes here. Alright guys, so the images have finished infusing and what I want to do here next is go to all photographs and you’ll see all these recent ones here.

I’m going to select all our pictures here from this session and I’m just going to make a new collection. I want to keep the bracketed images for now and you’ll see why in a few minutes. But the HDRs are in here as well.

So I’m just going to call this example photos. Create. So now we have all our photos in a collection here. Since I added the appendage of HDR, if I just type HDR here, these will just bring up the HDRs that we made from infuse.

So now I’m just going to go to develop module and we’re going to start working on these. So you see, it blended all the images together. It looks okay already. I like to start by hitting auto. That brightened it up a bit, which is what I wanted to do for sure.

It’s really not a whole lot you have to do with these really guys. I mean, keep this pretty basic and fast. Raise exposure a little bit. I’m going to highlight it a little bit. Alright, so we got this orangey light here that’s kind of making the sync look a little orange and dingy.

So I kind of want to address that. One thing I am going to do here is like to add clarity. Usually I’m somewhere in the neighborhood of like 17 to 20 on it. Yeah, so I’m going to go to saturation, the saturation slaughter thing here.

And then I’m going to take a little orange out of this globally. And then the white balance is pretty good overall. Maybe take it a little bit on the cool side, negative two. And what I’m going to do here to get the sync look a little wider is I’m just going to take a brush.

I’m just going to put my saturation down in here on it a little bit. I’m just going to brush over this a little bit. it. See it’s desaturating this a little bit. A little bit maybe I’m gonna take this a little bit further.

So that made this a little bit whiter. Even this tile over here. I just want this white stuff to look pretty white. Otherwise you know when it has an orangey dinge to it it just makes it look dingy. So this just makes it look clean.

The door jam here is poking through here a little bit. So what I want to do here I’m gonna try to just crop it out maybe. The other thing I’m noticing is it’s a little like purple going on here like chromatic aberration kind of stuff.

So again I’m gonna take my slider and get this little purple area. As you see the blue and purple are coming down here. And there’s nothing blue or purple in this image so it shouldn’t really mess with anything.

Brought that down quite a bit. Yeah, so that’s much better and you know this is kind of before and after. It’s really not complicated editing here we’re doing. This is pretty, like I said, basic and straightforward.

You know you can get pretty good results with this. The one other thing I want to do here is something about this window. I like to be able to see all my windows. You know sometimes if there’s a house or something out there that you don’t want to see then you wouldn’t do this.

So if we find, I’m going to find one of these darker brackets. That’s really dark. This one is pretty good. So we’re just caring about the window here. So I’m going to bring this over towards that one.

So now we have these two here. And what I want to do, I just want to copy any lens corrections you do, any transforming you do, any cropping you do. I want to copy all those things and paste it on here so that these images will now line up perfectly.

So now what I’m going to do is select both of these, control click and I’m going to go edit in open as layers and Photoshop. Alright, so now these images are loaded as layers and Photoshop. As you see over here, you have both layers.

The exposure of this window I’m actually pretty happy with but if it was a little too dark or a little too bright, I would just go exposure layer here and adjust the exposure. All I’m caring about is the window.

So I’m just looking at the window and getting it to where I want to be. Once I had the exposure where I wanted, I would just merge that layer. So what we’re going to do here is just really mask out this window.

And I’m going to do that. I’m just going to usually use the lasso tool thing. And I’m just going to go around this window here. Mask this out. Let’s handle here so I’m just going to kind of go around this here.

It doesn’t have to be like super, super perfect. We can fix that in a minute. And with this top layer selected here, I’m just going to hit command X and cut it. Now we can see out of our window. I just want to clean this up a little bit.

I’m going to select the window layer and I’m just going to go to the clone stamp tool and just kind of go over this here. Just go around and get rid of that fringe there. Some of those. there, there, there.

And this little glare or whatever this is. You know, that looks a lot better. That looks cleaner, doesn’t it? I mean, some people will disagree on these things. I mean, these window pulls. Some people think it looks artificial.

Sometimes people think if it’s a little blown out looking, it’s actually natural looking. So that’s really, you know, up to your discretion. But I like the look of it. I think it looks clean, as I said.

And so yeah, I’m pretty happy with that. And you know, if you had a view out the window of water or anything like that, you know, that’s how you get the nice view out the window. I’m just gonna merge these layers and save.

Go back to Lightroom. So now here we have our layer here with our window. That’s why I keep these brackets around here in my collection for now. So I can pull a window when I need to or anything like that.

So I’m just gonna delete this original one out of my collection at least. And I’m gonna go on to the next image. All right, so here we have the kitchen image. Again, I’m gonna hit Auto. This very orangey yellow going on here globally.

So I’m just gonna take down the white balance here. Decent amount. You know, now that they’ve got the dishwasher looking pretty white, the ceiling’s looking pretty white. It’s not changing the color so much.

But around there is good. They add some clarity to this. Let’s just shut those up a little bit more so you can see the cabinets. Really, that is good. I don’t see anything else really wrong with this.

Again, we can go in and mask the windows in. I’m not gonna do that for every image here. I showed you how that’s done. I’m not gonna take up your time with that. Moving on, I’m gonna hit Deliver Your Image here.

And again, I’m gonna hit Auto. It’s a little too bright, my opinion. There’s some clarity in here. That’s about good. Again, this is little orangey. I mean these lights are orange, you know. But I want to take it down a little bit globally here.

Not around there. You know, I’ve got the natural light here looking clean on the couch. But these are obviously casting an orange. So that’s fine. Looks like I got one of my son’s cars here that I missed.

I just removed that. Basically, I think this image is fine. Again, you can do the windows here like I showed you. Let’s move on to the next one. Just have this bedroom image. Again, I’m going to hit auto.

And there’s… It’s a little orangey -dingy looking here. I’m gonna globally bring the white balance down a little bit. Got some clarity in here. I’m gonna use my saturation here to see if I can kind of subdue that orange here a little bit more.

Yeah, that looks good. See, that just makes it look cleaner, doesn’t it? So before, after, these are just basic adjustments we’re making here. Like I said, this is a basic approach, nothing advanced, just really making basic changes.

But, you know, it yields a nice result, I think. So once I have all my images edited and I’m happy with them, I will just select all my HDRs here. You know, I could delete the rest of these, or remove them from my collection, but I’m not gonna do that right now.

I’m just gonna select my HDR, finished images here, and I’m gonna Command -Shift -E to do an export. And what I do is I’ll pick my folder, I’ll get desktop example photos, and I’ll choose that. And I’ll rename it usually to the address, you know, 1, 2, 3, Main Street, or whatever the address is of the home we shot, and, you know, add the number on to it.

And I’ll do output sharpening for screen, because these will end up… Being viewed on the computer screen, I’ll just do a standard amount of sharpening. I’ll export and then we’ll take a look at the finished images.

Okay guys, I know this was a long video with a lot of information in it, but I hope it gave you a good understanding of the fundamentals of shooting real estate photography. Like I said, there are other methods with using lights and more gear, but for this video, I just wanted to concentrate on the basics and supply you with a solid foundation for you to build from.

You certainly don’t have to move to using lights at some point, as there’s many real estate photographers out there that have made a career out of shooting without them. There’s multiple methods to shooting real estate and they all have their merits, so my recommendation would be to try things and see what works best for you.

Photographers love to argue about what the best method is, but at the end of the day, it just comes down to personal preference. There’s no right or wrong answer. Thanks so much for watching and if you found this video helpful, please hit the like button, subscribe and enable notifications for future videos.

Again, if you’re interested in any of the gear or software mentioned in this video, there’ll be links to it down in the description below. Thanks again guys, and I’ll see you in the next one.