My House is Falling Down

 

~ Hover Mouse to see Before and After

This Old House is Falling Down  ,  ,  ,

Post processing of photography for real estate is done for many reasons.  The image above was one captured by real esate photographer Joseph Kurtz.  A common issues with taking house photos is that you have to tilt the camera up to capture the entire home, and the result is tilted, or “converging” lines.  Joseph and I got into a discussion of how to fix these “converging lines” in house photographs.  Using tips from great real estate photographers such as Scott Hargis, I did some work on Josephs photograph and the before-and-after results are shown above. 

Without a specialized “tilt-shift” camera lens, photographers have to tilt the camera up in order to fit the entire home in the image. The resulting image shows the lines of the house as uneven; this is due to the physics of the light hitting a camera sensor that is not aligned with the lines of the home.  Tilt-shift, or perspective control lens are used by real estate and architectural photographers to solve this issue in the field.  However  these lenses are pricey, usually over $2,000, so they are not practical for photographers that don’t shoot a lot of real estate or architecture.  

Most photographers will have to accept these converging lines and fix them in Photoshop.  Fortunately, this is not that hard or time consuming, and a lot of great tutorials are available.  I used Photoshop / Edit / Transform on the image above but there are a number of techniques that work as well or better; technology changes all the time.  Video tutorials are a great way to learn new techniques; I suggest: 

~ see Scott Hargis Tutorial  new tutorial on using Lightroom and Photoshop on converging lines; this video uses the latest Lightroom and Photoshop lens filters database.  If you have an older version or are not yet familiar with using these type’s of filters, Scott’s older video on using Edit / Tranform / Skew is still a  great way to fix these issues.  

While you are at Scott’s site I suggest you bookmark Scotts’s blog and visit often and check out Scott’s book “Lighting Interiors” which IMHO is one of the best books on interior photography I have read.

~ see Photography for Real Estate blog for articles from many great real estate and architectural photographers 

That’s it for the converging lines, the next few steps were used to touch ups on color, contrast and crop

 * used Nik Viveza to lower exposure (brightness) on whilte walls using selective adjustment

 * used Nik Color Efex pro contrast and detail enhancer to add contrast to image

 * used Nik Define to reduce noise, and PS spot removal to remove dust spots.

 * crop 9:16 (1.78 hor/ver ratio similar to HD video)

JPG artifacts can be seen due to all this processing on a flat jpg image. Post processing should be done with full res PSD or TIFF, not compressed JPG. Open in PS or LR, save as 16bit TIFF or PSD then post process, save. Duplicate image, flatten layers and do any crop, save as 8bit JPG to publish.

Thats it~

Steve Loos

Curiuos techy’s;

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