Do you want to know how to easily enhance your exterior home photos to make them look captivating?
As more and more real estate transactions happen online, it’s becoming ever more crucial to use top-notch exterior home photos to make your listing stand out. Luckily, there are a few easy edits you can do to make your real estate photos shine.
In this post, we’ll show you 7 tips on how to easily enhance your exterior home photos to capture buyers’ attention and help accelerate a sale.
But before we dig in deeper, let’s take a look at why post-processing is crucial to produce top-notch real estate photography.
Why Post-Processing Is Crucial for Exterior Home Photos
Real Estate Photo Editing in Action
Video by PhotoUp
Even though high-quality photography is crucial for real estate marketing, it doesn’t just end there. Real estate photographers, agents, and sellers are increasingly employing image post-processing techniques to make the property look its best.
The reason for this is that it’s more or less impossible to take property photos at the best time of day when the weather is perfect and the lawn is perfectly green and vibrant.
So, that’s when using image post-processing techniques comes into the picture.
7 Tips to Easily Enhance Exterior Home Photos
Here are 7 simple, yet powerful photo editing techniques to make your listing stand out and attract more homebuyers.
1. Lighting & Contrast Enhancements
The first and easiest thing to do in order to present the home’s exterior in the best possible light (no pun intended) is to adjust the lighting and contrast. This will make your property photos look bright and vibrant.
Once your image look appealing, you can also change the hue and saturation settings to make the colors pop.
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2. Sky Replacement
One of the most impactful adjustments you can make to a real estate photograph has nothing to do with the property itself, but the sky surrounding it.
Sky replacement can enhance a photograph by making it look more bright and sunny.
Here are some benefits of sky replacement in real estate photographs:
- It makes your property look more appealing
- Provides real estate photographers more freedom since they don’t have to worry about the weather
- Nothing affects a person’s mood more than the weather. Blue, sunny skies lift our spirits, while grey heavy skies drag us down
- Offers unlimited possibilities to enhance your photos
To see how this is done, check out our video tutorial on how to replace a winter sky in Photoshop:
3. Day to Dusk Editing
Photographers and cinematographers call dusk ‘the golden hour’ and there’s a reason for this…
…that’s the time when the harsh white light of the day softens, the colors come out and everything in the frame is washed with a golden glow of light that makes everything look “picture perfect” (pun intended).
Everyone knows the immediate positive effects of transforming the sky into an evening scene. But lots of people forget that you also need to work on a house’s interior and exterior lighting to ensure that it remains the star of the show.
To see this in action, check out our video tutorial on how to edit a day to dusk image in Photoshop:
4. Green Grass Enhancement
A well-manicured, healthy lawn sends the right message about your exterior home photos and immediately helps increase the curb appeal of any listing.
But sometimes you need to take photos in the wrong season when the lawn has dead, brown spots. And while that’s unfortunate, the good news is that this is an easy fix.
In our how to green grass in Photoshop video tutorial, we’ll show you simple steps to make your lawn look green and amazing:
5. Removing Ghosting From Trees
As a real estate photographer, you know that light flares and ghosting in a photo are fairly common phenomena. Ghosting can happen when shooting bracketed images for HDR photography.
For example, trees blowing in the wind move from one exposure to the next across multiple images, causing the final blended image to show the tree branches or leaves with a blurred or “ghosting” effect.
Even though ghosting can enhance the mood of a photo in some cases, it comes across as a bit manipulative and cheesy in real estate marketing. It can take away the professional look of exterior home photos.
Thankfully, it’s easy to remove ghosting using Photoshop if you know your way around the software. So, have a look at our how to remove ghosting in trees video tutorial to see how it’s done:
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6. Removing Unwanted Objects
To enhance your exterior home photos, you may need to remove unwanted object from your photos.
For example, here are a few situations when you should consider performing object removal:
- There’s an unwanted car in the driveway
- You failed to notice a person walking through the exterior just as you took the shot
- There’s an ugly spot of peeling paint in the exterior of the home
- There’s trash left on the pavement next to the house
Removing these objects using Photoshop can improve your overall real estate photography. And fortunately, you can do this in a few simple steps.
For more details, check out our video tutorial on how to remove a car from a driveway in Photoshop:
7. Virtual Landscaping
Virtual landscaping is the most common type of enhancement technique for exterior home photos. As we know, curb appeal sells houses, and improving the landscaping virtually is a big part of that.
With virtual landscaping, you can easily make the grass greener, freshen or liven up trees and plants, and repair fences and cracks in the exterior paint of the property.
You can even add modern, beautiful outdoor furniture and a pool/patio area to the property!
The goal is for homebuyers to see how the house would look with a fully maintained, updated, and manicured yard.
Since this form of editing requires special software, your can let a professional real estate photo editing company like PhotoUp perform your virtual landscaping.
At the low cost of $25 per image, PhotoUp’s virtual staging designers will edit your exterior or interior property photos and return them to you in less than 48 hours, looking amazing!
Enhance Your Real Estate Photography With PhotoUp
If you’re looking for the best real estate photo editing experience possible, PhotoUp should be your first choice.
Except for the photo editing tips presented in this blog post, PhotoUp’s real estate photo editing services also include:
- Image correction and enhancement
- Color and tone adjustments
- Lawn greening and sky replacements
- Clutter and object removal
- Line and angle corrections
- Virtual staging
- Video editing
- Single property websites
- House portraits
- Virtual Assistants and Transaction Coordinators
- And much more!
Why don’t you try us out for yourself?
Sign up for a free PhotoUp account today, and let our expert real estate photo editors make your exterior home photos look specular from as little as $1.50 per image.
You won’t regret it!
We hope this post helped you learn how to easily enhance your exterior home photos. If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out the following resources:
