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
Wow! Something I can comment on because that was literally my job! So the pictures are taken by freelance photographers who use super wide lenses. Bordering on fisheye lenses but not. They upload them from home to our server and we have to retouch them. Around 5-10 seconds spent on each one. Any more than that and you are gonna get fired.
Anywhoo. The people saying HDR and exposure merging are flat out wrong. The thing that happens is we use a plugin called HDR Fx. This plugin essentially you create masks and apply adjustments to them and they will apply throughout the photo and sort of play nice together.
Walls and floor done first. Dragging all the sliders up to make it look much more brighter than it is in reality. This has the added effect of over exposing and getting rid of most of the stains and scratches and stuff on the walls. The floor exposure also is jacked up a lot. Overall it is a scam to make the place look whiter, cleaner, and brighter than it actually is.
The same goes for external shots. But the added step is running an automated photoshop action that deletes the white sky and replaces it with a stock photo of a blue sky and clouds. We had about 3 choices of sky actions depending on the situation. If you pay close attention the clouds in the external photos will look the same all the time.
It is a HUGE scam. The company that does it (I won’t name) is a sketchy af bad business, treating the employees like crap. Pushing us to retouch photos at the rate where I would go home with sore hands.
It is not an industry standard. What it is. Is that one company has the monopoly on the photos and signage for real estate and no other company does it pretty much so it all looks the same because nobody else is doing it.
No HDR. No exposure merging. There is no time for that stuff. It is just brute force selective adjustments and since the plugin uses masks boosting exposure on everything makes it look that way.
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