I recently put my house on the market. I’m a photographer. Naturally, one thing immediately popped into my mind when it came time to list the house…taking my own photos of the house. I’ve been toying with the idea of breaking into real estate photography for a little while, and thought that moving to Colorado would make a good starting point for that venture. Since I had to get my own home looking nice for sale, it would make a good guinea pig.

During my research for this new venture, I stumbled across a real estate photography blog, aptly named Photography For Real Estate written by Larry Lohrman. Larry knows his stuff, and I spent hours scouring his blog for useful information that I could use in my own photos. He was even nice enough to provide me a little feedback on the job I’d done, mentioning that the photos were good for a first time, though I needed to ensure that all vertical surfaces remained vertical in the photos. Mental note taken. If you ever need to do any kind of architectural photography, check out Larry’s site before you do.

So here are a couple of the interior shots from my own house. Here’s my living room:

Sublime Light is a web site dedicated to teaching you to photograph people like a pro. For the latest articles, check out the home page.

I got an email from a reader a couple days ago asking what to do with the files that are obtained when shooting in RAW mode. This seemed like a good time to give a quick primer on shooting RAW and getting your hands on some finished photos.

Why Shoot RAW?

I’ll start with a few reasons why shooting RAW can be a good thing. This list is by no means exhaustive.

• You get a higher dynamic range. Your camera can capture a slightly broader range of light from the shadows to the highlights than if you were shooting JPEGs. Given the narrow range on digital cameras, a little extra can’t hurt.
• You capture the highest quality image. JPEGs are compressed images, and you lose some of the image quality. A RAW file gives you exactly what the sensor captured so that you can make your own decisions later on how to process the image. The trade-off here is that RAW files are much larger than their JPEG siblings thanks to the lack of compression.
• You gain ultimate control. Processing RAW files means you can tweak the image after the fact just like you were making the changes to the camera before you snapped the picture. For example, you can change the white balance on a photo after the fact. You can’t do that with a JPEG.

Software Choices

Viewing and processing RAW files requires a little bit of extra time, knowledge, and software. Here are just a few applications that I’m familiar with for viewing and processing RAW files:

Original image

We take a lot of pictures with our son, and he has really great skin color. The problem is, when my wife and I are in pictures with him, we always come out looking sunburned while he looks great. Luckily, there’s a quick and easy fix in Photoshop that just gets quicker with a little practice.

You can use this technique in all sorts of ways, but one of the most useful I’ve found is for correcting the skin tone of a portrait subject. For example, you can count on someone getting themselves actually sunburned while everyone else looks fine at least once in your photography days. Here’s how to fix it.

Step 1 – Create a Color Balance adjustment layer. After opening the file in Photoshop, go down to the layers palette and click the icon that’s a half black, half white circle. This pops up a menu for adjustment layers. Choose “Color Balance…”.

Original Image

If you’ve been taking photographs for any length of time, you’ve surely come across the technique of turning color digital photographs into black and white photographs. Doing this to some photos can really add a level of drama and impact that would not be there if the photo was in color.

But sometimes you have a photo that you don’t like in color. But you don’t like it in black and white either. It’s a no-man’s-land photo, and you need a way to save it. Desaturating the color without completely blowing it away may be a good option.

I’ll show you how to make this simple change to your photo in Photoshop. Any photo editing software should do just fine though if you don’t have Photoshop. Here’s how to do it:

When it comes to portraiture, the work is only half done once you’ve pressed the shutter button. Often, the subjects of your photos will have small blemishes that they really don’t want to live for eternity over their fireplace. One of the best things you can do to turn a photo session into a product sale is to retouch the photos.

If you’re using Photoshop, your primary weapon here is the healing brush. It’s a great tool for quickly and easily removing scratches, pimples, blemishes, and even scars. Even stray hair in the face is no problem once you’ve had some practice. The healing brush blends color and texture to create a nice, even replacement and you’ll never know anything was there to begin with.