Why do real estate photos all have “that look”?

1.13K viewsOtherTechnology

When scrolling through galleries of photos for residential (and some commercial) properties, it always seems like the perspective is off. But each picture seems a little differently off – almost like a fisheye lens, but not. What are they using to do that and why has that “look” become industry standard, even when we all know the pictures aren’t true to life?

In: Technology

22 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

One thing I haven’t seen yet in the comments, and I’ll explain like you’re 5.

When you take a picture, or look at something, the vertical lines don’t necessarily look exactly straight. They do something called “converge”. If you look up at tall buildings in a city, they sort of all go to the same point in the sky.

When a real estate photographer takes a picture they do an editing technique called “vertical transformation”, or “tilt-shift” or something similar. This makes all of the walls and vertical lines in the picture perfectly vertical. When you take a picture with your phone, for example, it is extraordinarily unlikely that you’ll make all of your verticals perfectly vertical.

This means real estate photography is unlike the other pictures we see every day. Normally we don’t bother correcting vertical lines because we’re used to seeing the world natural and a little wonky. There is a certain “perfectness” that is a bit uncanny when you see a fully corrected image that can be offputting

You are viewing 1 out of 22 answers, click here to view all answers.