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
It’s one of my favorite jokes that a body could be hidden in plainsight on every photo, but you wouldn’t notice because of creative angling.
Generally shot with a 38 mm lens giving a mild fish eyed look, allowing as much of the property as possible in the picture
I wish I knew what you’re talking about. Every realtor in Texas is cheap and lazy to the point where it looks like they just barely bothered to get out of bed and take a few photos with their cell phone. No editing at all. Just a complete lack of effort and skill unless the house is worth more than a million bucks.
I’ve moved 8 times, and sold a home each time. The reason. Why the perspective is off, is because the photographer is trying to make each room look as big as possible. The goal is for people to look at the pics and say, wow, that home looks great and has tons of good space. Let’s look at that one. I’ve had photographers move furniture so they can cram the camera in a corner just so they make to room look a tiny bit larger.
**Wide angle lens.**
The frame of a camera is a rectangle, and our vision is basically round.
So, we gen a camera sees the same way we do, you capture less of what we see with our eyes, because it’s limited by the rectangular frame.
To include what we see with our peripheral vision, we have to cram more into the same rectangular space.
This is done using wide angle lenses. And yes, a fisheye lens is a type of wide angle lens but an extreme one.
So a real estate photographer picks a wide angle lens so that they can cram what you see with your eye into a nice rectangular frame.
You can do the same thing yourself with your 0.5x setting in your phone camera.
Wide angle lenses of course means the image is distorted in a way – the center of the frame is compressed and the edges are stretched. It’s literally like tunnel vision.
But why use this at all? Why not just back up and take a photo?
Because most of the time, you can back up all the way with your back to the wall and you still can’t represent in a frame what you can see with your peripheral vision.
And it is this peripheral vision that gives us a sense of space. The photos may not be accurate and make the space seem larger than it is, but picking the “accurate” lens has a problem: it only shows a very myopic/claustrophobic view of a room or hall, typically just half or a third of a room. You don’t want to look at a photo of a room and just see a window and a foot’s worth of side wall.
What’s more, there’s no good way to show one side of a room with a reasonably significant amount of adjacent walls. With the “accurate” lens, yo be able to show a whole room, you will inevitably have nano with a photo that is literally “all wall”. Like, literally a blank slate of color – and that doesn’t help anyone and it definitely looks unprofessional.
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.
High-profile architectural photographer here on a burner account. Normally I just like to lurk but this is an interesting thread and I wanted to weigh in. This starts with a simple enough question — basically, why do real estate photos tend to look “off?” And then a mix of responses ranging from the reasonable to the absurd.
A lot of you are blindly mentioning techniques and equipment. It’s HDR! No, it’s fisheye lenses! Wait, it’s flambient! Maybe it’s tilt-shift! Each of these things can be used effectively, applied to the appropriate context. The poor craftsman blames the tools, right?
The reason real estate photos look the way they do is based on economics. And simple economics at that — there is no financial incentive for the real estate agent or the photographer to invest the time and effort to produce quality images. Sometimes it happens, when one or both of them have standards, but it’s not common.
The best reply here is by ah-chamon-ah, demonstrating how quick-n-dirty editing applied to quick-n-dirty shooting produces the results you all know and love.
P.S. All you professional real estate photographers out there, can you just make this room look a little bigger?
Everyone is mentioning highly edited high dynamic range photos, which is one thing, but one thing I don’t see here is the use of a tilt shift lens!
But first, let’s backtrack a bit. For a lot of architectural photography, to capture the architecture itself in context with the area around it, you would use a wide angle lens. You can get wide angle fish eye lenses (characterized by circular distortion that makes things look bulbous), but this is not preferred as it doesn’t keep the lines in your photos straight. For this, you need a wide angle rectilinear lens. [You can see the difference here.](https://www.pano-guru.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/fisheye_vs_wideangle1.jpg)
But that’s not all. Usually when you’re photographing a house, you want to have the whole house in frame. So you tilt the camera up as it’s a tall structure, but what ends up happening is that you have all the lines pointing inward as it goes up. Well that might not be very representative of the house. So many architectural photographers use a tilt shift lens. [It’s a lens with glass elements that can be angled to shift the plane of focus (and light) to correct for this change in perspective](https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2015/04/tiltshiftheader.jpg)
Wide angle lens plus a feature in the software that fixes distortion and makes everything straight, nice and vertical. So it ends up looking a bit distorted, but not.
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
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