There is often discussion on real estate blogs about how far (if at all) a real estate agent / photographer should travel down the photo retouching road.
Athol Kay has a great series titled “Pimp My Listing Photo” that covers acceptable ways to “manipulate” real estate photos.
My personal take is it is perfectly acceptable to correct tilt, exposure, fisheye distortion and other such things Athol frequently talks about. I also don’t see a problem with removing things that are “temporary” such as trash cans, autos, the dog, etc. (though really, it’s far less hassle to move them before you shoot the photo…).
You’re going way too far if you conveniently take out things like telephone poles, holes in the wall and start changing colors, or make the roof look like new. That’s misrepresentation in my book.
I don’t have the technical skills (yet) to pimp a photo as well as Athol. Nor do I have the artistic skills to really manipulate a photo. Want to see what a good Photoshop artist can do? Check out this photoshop contest where folks take a pimping a photo of a bathroom to the extreme.
Here is my favorite:
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I thought I was going to end up at a joke.
I agree with fixing lighting, etc. But not the “make-the-room-look-bigger-and-better-than-it-is-in-person” fixes that we’ve all seen done!
Nice Photoshopping to that bathroom!
I’ll take the floating house for 200k.
What? It doesn’t float? I’ll see you in court for false advertisement!
That is one heckuva tile job! Very talented.
Great post Jay, I loved the giant hamster in the bathroom photo in the links.
My take on photo editing is that as long as it’s not a material fact, then you can have at it with the editing.
I do “change colors” though. Not so much in a “lets make the green walls cream colored” sense, but that there are half a dozen ways to tweak a color to adjust for tone, warmth, brightness and so on. This is on purpose and designed to be subconsciously manipulative to the viewer as an influence towards booking a showing. If it’s done right you don’t even notice something was done.
That sounds terribly evil, but what the heck… it’s meant to be a sales piece.
Shameless, brazen huckstering with your linkbait regarding what Billy-G reads.
Well done.
You might check out GIMP… an open source alternative to PS. But, I’m still not good with it…
Your sense of humor catches the right funny bone every time. No exception. keep more of such posts coming. Thanks.
So thats what the bathroom looks like on the International Space Station. Should have gotten a better designer but I guess they just went with the traditional white goes with everything. HAHA
Most pictures need a little photoshopping (some a lot more than others), but I agree with you, Jay, removing permanent fixtures or covering defects up is taking it way to far and is very deceptive.
I agree Jay, a bit here and there doesn’t harm anyone when editing photos, but I have come across stunts like removing a nearby railway form the background. As a Realtor my business rep is the basis of my profits and I just hate cheaters … especially since sooner or later all this tricks are discovered and this gives realtors a bad name…
I think you should lose your real estate license and/or get in deep trouble for altering material facts of a property in photos. There is no difference whatsoever between saying “underground oil tank removed” on a disclosure form when you know damn well it wasn’t, and photoshopping a buckling retaining wall into a non-buckling retaining wall.
That being said, selective cropping can do wonders. Just because your back yard is lit up 24/7 from the lights of Wal-Marts parking lot, doesn’t mean you have to get the Wal-Mart parking lot into the photo. But photoshop 20 cars and a 200ft light out of the photo… that is teh wrong.
Obviously, changing material facts is wrong when PhotoShopping, but even changing colors or other permanent things such as the color of the walls is a grey area for me. I worry that a client might lose trust over something like that. Just my opinion, though.
The Photoshop artist also thought of putting transparent pipes in the bathroom, definitely a plus value to sell it.
i cant do it..
Jay,
Thank you so much. As a new agent to photoshop, this does help a lot!
Pretty neat stuff. I’ve been looking into some training for photoshop. Lynda.com has some great stuff.
When buying a place recently we saw a house that from the photo blatantly had nice green grass photoshoped onto the front lawn…it wasn’t even a good job. Made me laugh.
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That last picture is excellent. And the bathroom itself looks horrible even without the photoshopping, I think the photoshopping actually improved it.