The real estate industry heavily relies on visual appeal for sales. Most customers prefer to see clean and well-kept properties on the listing before setting an appointment to see the premises. Several agents rely on professional post-production companies like Phixer to edit real estate images suited for marketing campaigns and sales strategies.
You can market real estate properties online through several platforms, so you should make the most of the free digital exposure by editing the images beautifully. Improve conversion rates by maximizing the attractiveness of your photos. Read more to discover how to make adjustments to real estate photos for competitiveness and marketability.
Value of Marketability
Primarily, people post real estate listing photos to promote sales; therefore, marketability is at the forefront of editing considerations. Marketability is an essential design aspect because it determines the property’s sales outcome, such as failure or success.
Product marketability has two categories:
- Design for the target audience
- Advertisement for the target audience
In practice, you can virtually stage the property to suit the target home buyers or edit real estate images to advertise according to buyer psychology. Real estate marketing trends continuously adapt to changing times like the most recent COVID-19 pandemic.
Why You Should Edit Real Estate Photographs
Images will introduce possible buyers to the property, so you must consider buyer psychology when editing them. Here are the seven deciding factors according to the home buyer psychological considerations:
- Emotion – 44% purchase homes because they feel good in them.
- House with a story – closely linked to emotional attachment, clients buy homes with touching histories.
- Perceived value – clients are more likely to purchase a house with great aesthetics and condition regardless of current market value.
- Suits ideal lifestyle – since most customers spend time at home, they are more likely to buy a property appropriate to their lifestyle.
- Cultural superstitions – these often involve the kind of numbers attached to the property.
- Excellent first impressions – clean and neat real estate properties attract more buyers.
- Social proof or influence – trust and testimonials reflect credibility.
It’s important to note that most considerations don’t revolve around market values or facts and figures but the home’s appeal, emotion, and aesthetics. For example, you can invoke emotion even before the visit by posting a virtually staged listing photo.
There is a method and art to real estate graphics editing, and it’s simpler than most people would think. You can do it with Adobe Photoshop or any graphics editing or photo manipulation software.
How to Edit Real Estate Pictures
The first rule on how to make adjustments to real estate photos is maintaining its natural state unless you’re virtually staging your property. It’s essential to be as realistic as possible, especially when posting the images on listing sites and social media pages.
Here are straightforward real estate photo editing techniques:
1. Adjust Exposure
The lighting can make or break the image ambiance when you edit property photos. Overexposure, too much light, or underexposure, too little light, could ruin the overall effect of the picture. There are automatic adjustment settings that could help improve exposure.
Darkening overexposed area:
- You can use the Burn tool to darken an overexposed area.
- Set the tool as Highlights on the top menu and paint over the area you want to shade.
- Exposure default is often 50%, but you should start at 10%.
2. Adjust Levels
Levels setting allows you to manipulate the image’s color balance and tonal range by modifying image highlights, midtones, and shadows intensity levels. The histogram is a graphic guide in changing the fundamental tones of the image, and the Levels setting improves how to edit real estate pictures.
Adjusting tonal settings:
- Select Levels from the panel menu or choose the Levels icon located in the Adjustments panel.
- Pick Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels. Affirm your selection in the New Layer dialog box pop up.
The external input Levels indicators mark the black end and white end to the settings of the output indicators. The Output sliders mark 0, where the pixels are black, and 255 white by default. Moving the black input slider maps the pixel value to level 0, and adjusting the white point slider maps the pixel value to level 255. The remaining levels spread between levels 0 and 255, increasing the image’s tonal range and improving the overall picture contrast. The middle Input slider adjusts the image’s gamma. It moves the mid-tone (level 128) and modifies the intensity values of the mid-range of gray tones without drastically changing the shadows and highlights.
You can save Levels settings as a preset then apply them to other images.
3. Remove Clutter
Buyers want to see the house or property in its best state, so removing unnecessary objects and distractions is one way to edit property photos. You can hire a company or freelancer to remove excess objects or do it yourself.
Here are some ways to edit out unwanted items on your real estate images:
- Spot Healing Brush tool automatically samples pixels from a specific area to edit on top of the unwanted item and blend with the surroundings.
- Healing Brush tool works like Spot Healing Brush, but it allows you to select the pixels to utilize as a spot.
- Clone Stamp tool gives more coverage because it copies content from one area to a selected location without blending.
- Content-Aware workspace allows you to hide huge areas of an image, offering a live previous enabling control over the many options.
Final Thoughts
There’s no shame in doing post-production magic to get more sales. The highly-competitive real estate industry is dependent on real estate graphics editing to promote less marketable properties. However, it would help if you made an effort to remain accurate in your representation of real estate images because too much exaggeration or edits could tarnish your credibility.