Five Real Estate Image Enhancement Tips to Spruce Up a Listing

Once you get a potential buyer onto the page with a real estate listing, the most important element will be the images. While buyers may read a description, they’re going to pay a lot of attention to the images. It’s up to the photographer, the real estate agent and the editor to make sure that those images put the home in its best light and make it look attractive to potential buyers. That’s why real estate image processing is so important. The right techniques of image enhancement can make rooms look larger and brighter. Below mentioned real estate image enhancement tips can help you spruce up your real estate listing:

1. Balance the Brightness and Darkness in the Photo – The first step is to use Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight feature in order to adjust the darkest and brightest parts of the picture. You can adjust the sliders in order to make the brightest parts a little darker and the darkest parts a little brighter. This will naturally make the picture look a bit better, eliminating the extremes.
2. Take Advantage of Automatic Features – You can use Photoshop’s features such as Auto Contrast and Auto Color in order to utilize the power of the software to detect what can be improved in the image. This is the easiest step of real estate image enhancement.
3. Brighten Up the Picture – This is another simple step. Simply go to the settings for Brightness and Contrast and add some of each. Once again you can fool around with the sliders to see what looks best, but adding some brightness will tend to make the room look bigger and it can make surfaces such as flooring, countertops and paint on walls look newer.
4. Add Some Color – You can go into the Hue and Saturation settings and add some color by pumping up the saturation. This will bring out the colors that are already present in the photo and make them easier to notice so that they really stand out. This process basically brightens up existing colors and makes them stronger.
5. Add Sharpness – The final tip is to add some sharpness. You can use one of the sharpness filters, such as Sharpen Edges, in order to make the image appear a little bit crisper. Once again you do not want to overdo it, so play around with the sliders until you feel like you’re striking a good balance between improving the photo and making it look like a fake.

Applying all of those effects is the easy part. The tough part is making sure that everything is done in moderation and that the overall effect is exactly as desired. You don’t want to do too much, but you can’t do too little either. The challenge is standing out without looking like you’re trying too hard to stand out. Working with an expert who regularly performs real estate image enhancement is the best way to make sure that you get the appropriate amount of image editing.