Real Estate Photography Masterclass

1. Welcome to Class! What Will You Learn? Who is this Course For?: Welcome to the real estate photography course. I'm going to teach you a simple approach to taking amazing real estate photos. So first off, what is this class all about? In this class, I'm going to teach you the gear. You need to take great photos, how to use that gear, what settings to use for real estate photos. You're going to learn how to compose your photos for any room that you go into. You're going to learn several different lighting styles, whether you want to use lights or not, I'll teach you how to take great photos. So we're going to cover using flashes, using natural light. Then also what's called the flamboyant technique, which is a popular approach to taking photos for real estate. I'm going to show you how to edit those photos. So sometimes it's just making a great single photo look amazing. Other times it's a bit more advanced and combining several photos into one. And then lastly, you're going to learn how to start a real estate photo business. So from finding your first clients and building out your portfolios to more advanced things on how to sustain yourself as a real estate photographer. Who is this course for? Primarily this course is aimed at photographers who know how to take photos and want to make money with their photography. Real estate photography is a great skill to have, even if it's not your passion. But you can make money from it. And then you can go off and do the fun photography that you love, street photography, landscape photography, portraits or whatever. But real estate photography is a great one. You can fall back on to actually make a living from. This course is also for real estate agents, landlords, anyone that has a short-term rental who wants to take great photos, because great photos, cell properties, you can make a lot more money whether you're selling a home or you're just trying to rent it out. If your photos look amazing, What's the basic goal with real estate photography? The goal is to show the general details, space, and layout of a room. It is not to create a dramatic, stylized photo. So you're not going to get too creative with the way you edit your photos, really. We just want to show the space, but we want it to look amazing. We want the lighting to look good. We want details to pop. We want the exterior to be highlighted if necessary. Those are all things that we're going to cover how to do in this class. Here's a few examples of the style of photography. We're going for. Wide shots showing the space, bathrooms, kitchens, every space I'm going to talk about in this class, I'm going to have real demonstrations of the rooms. So I'm not just going to talk about it. I'm going to show you what to do. And lastly, why do great real estate photos matter? They matter because better photos sell more. You can sell a house for more. You can get more rentals. You can charge higher for your rentals if you have great photos. This has been proven time and time again by people who host short, short term rentals or by people who sell properties. You probably know this yourself too. If you go on Zillow to look for houses, if you go on Airbnb to look for a rental, you are drawn to the one with the better photos, they get the first clicks, and they also sell at a higher price. So it's a very valuable skill, whether you're doing it for yourself or you can use it for someone who needs your services. So that's what we're going to be covering in this class. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I'm always open to suggestions for ways to improve our classes, and I just hope you enjoy the experience. Alright, let's move on. 2. What Gear Do You Need as a Real Estate Photographer?: What gear do you need to be a real estate photographer? There are three main things. A camera with a lens and a tripod. For cameras, you can use DSLR or mirrorless cameras. Either is perfectly fine. The debate over which one is better. It could go on for years. Most brands are moving towards mirrorless cameras. The setups are a little bit lighter, but in terms of price, things are about comparable now. But if you're getting into this and you're looking to buy a new camera, I would move towards a mirrorless camera because that's where companies are going. The more important question is crop sensor versus full frame. Because we are wanting wide shots of most rooms. Having a full frame camera allows us to more easily get those wide shots with more lenses. With a crop sensor camera, you will need a wider lens to be able to get those wider shots. And I'm gonna go over those lens options in just a second. Crop sensor cameras are generally cheaper than full-frame cameras. So that's the issue. If you're starting out, if you have a crop sensor camera, don't worry, you can use that. You do not need a full-frame camera. But if you are starting and you are looking to buy one, I would err on the side of full-frame if you have the budget. Now, I do want to cover smartphones. If you're a professional photographer looking to make money with this, I would not use a smartphone. It doesn't look professional and it doesn't give you the capabilities that you have with a DSLR or mirrorless camera. However, if you're an agent, if you're a landlord or a host, you can get away with a smartphone. You have to make sure you're paying more attention to things like composition then things like lighting and editing. Although smartphone cameras have come a long way and I'll talk about that more in the future. In terms of lenses for a full-frame camera, you'll want something between like 16 the 35 mm. If you're using crop sensor, you'll want something like a ten to 18. So depending on the camera and the lens, a ten millimeter on a crop sensor will be more similar to a 16 millimeter on a full frame. And I can tell you that for most spaces, especially tight spaces like a bathroom, you might need to be somewhere on a crop sensor like 12 mm. Whereas on a full frame, you'll be somewhere like between 16 and maybe like 24 or so. It really depends on the space, but I would say that anything tighter than 18 millimeter or even as 16 millimeter on a crop sensor can feel tight in certain spaces. So you will need one of those ultra wide zooms. And this is why I'm talking about with a full frame camera, you have more options. A 16 to 35 is more of like a standard range. You could get standard lenses at that size. Whereas on a crop sensor camera, those are more of those ultra wide zooms that are a little bit more specialized, not that you can't get those. It's just, there are going to be fewer options for you. Now, another thing to consider is a prime for Zoom. Remember, a zoom lens has multiple focal lengths. You can zoom 10-18, for example, or 16% 35, whereas a prime is just at 12 mm, at 16 mm primes are generally cheaper and they also have a wider open aperture generally. So you can open up and allow more light. That being said, with the settings we're using for real estate photo, we're usually using something like an F 8.0 to get more in focus. So having that wide-open aperture doesn't necessarily help us out. So that's one reason to get a prime for real estate photo. The other thing is if you are in a tight space or if you're in a room where there's furniture, being able to zoom in or out helps with your compositions. You can always crop in, crop out a little bit, but it's a little bit different than being able to quickly zoom in or zoom out with a prime lens, you're going to have to be moving your tripod a bit more. That being said in this class, I'm going to be using both zooms and primes to show you the difference. And you'll see me walking through the process depending on what room I'm in, I'm in. Here you can see examples of bathrooms where these are super tight spaces. But with a ultra wide lens, you're still able to see the space, see the different aspects of it, even if from a corner or from a doorway, another tool you'll need as a tripod. A tripod is necessary in a lot of cases because in indoor spaces, you will need to be locked down if you have a longer shutter speed, which we might be using, we'll talk more about settings in a minute in a future lesson. But you're going to want a low ISO. You're going to want to lock down your aperture and not open up all the way. And so that leaves our shutter speed to potentially be a bit longer than normal And hand-holding your camera might not be the best-case scenario for getting a sharp image. So having a tripods grade. The other reason is when we're doing more advanced photography such as flamboyant, where we're combining images with ambient light with natural light, with our Flash, maybe pulling a photo where we're exposing to the exterior, then those photos need to be locked down on a tripod so you're not getting any camera shake between photos. Fluid head versus geared had fluid heads are great because it's just easier to pan and tilt up and down. It's more when you're doing video that that's important. However, I like a fluid head tripod. I just find that I can lock down that specific composition more easily. They are more expensive, but I would I'd go for fluid head. And if you ever do get into video production and real estate, video is a thing you might as well have a fluid head tripod as well. Some other tools that you might want to consider adding to your toolkit or a remote shutter trigger. Again, when we're taking multiple photos. Bracketing is one style of photography where we are taking photos at different exposures and combining them so that we have a great general exposed photo. You want that photo to be locked down on a tripod, not touching it even with your finger because you might accidentally wiggle it a little bit. And so having an, a remote shutter trigger where you plug into your camera and you can just press it and not move the camera is great. Most modern cameras also come with an app where you can sync up with the mobile app on your phone and you can use that, which is great, but I find those a little bit wonky. If I can use that term, they don't always connect. They get disconnected. It's just more time-consuming to use those kinds of apps, but you can use those. Alright, now let's talk about the biggie lighting. There's lots of different lights out there. There's flashes, also known as strobes. Those are like the typical flash that you put on top of a camera. And in real estate photography, what we're going to be doing is not just on the camera, but off the camera, to the side of the camera. We're going to be walking around with our flash, taking flash photos. And so you'll need a flash that also has the trigger that connects to your camera. So there's lots of different options. We'll talk about brands in a minute, but flashes are what I would recommend. You can also use continuous lights. Right now I'm using a light to light this video. They are great for video. It's great because you can see what the room looks like with the light compared to a flashy. You can't really tell until you look at the photo what the result is. But with a continuous light source, you can set it up, you can move it around, you can see, okay, this looks good. I need to point it this way or that way. But they're heavier. They often have to be plugged into the wall unless you have a big battery pack on them. And so I would suggest getting flash or strobes which are lighter, more affordable, more easy to move around, and they don't have to be plugged in. You'll need with that light stands to hold up your flash. Unless you're gonna be like holding it up yourself. But I suggest just using a flash stand or a light stand and then also an umbrella and or lightbox, something that's white or silver that's going to spread out that light. The key is that a larger light source equals softer, less harsh shadows. So generally what we're going to be doing when we're lighting up a whole room is flashing into an umbrella or through diffusion so that the light is not hard, not creating harsh shadows. Sometimes we can use the ceiling and just bounce that flash off a ceiling or a wall to get that same effect. But you'll want to add this to your kit eventually. Here are some photo examples you can see, especially for interiors like this. You're not going to get this lighting when without a flash, there's no window, there's no natural light. You're going to need some kind of flash that's adding late to the scene. Even for this one where there's a big window, I can tell and you'll eventually be able to tell that this photo was shot not just with the exterior light coming in, not just with the ambient lights on the ceiling and the lamp there, but also with a flash to give it more light. Alright, so that's about the gear you need. Again, we're going to talk about settings and setting up this gear and a lot more depth coming up in the next few lessons. 3. Camera Settings & Modes to Use for Real Estate Photography: In this lesson, you're going to learn the basic settings I recommend for real estate photography, everything is a starting point. Depending on your situation, you might need to adjust a little bit. But here are the basic rules of thumb that I would follow for your camera if you want to set it up to aperture priority mode, just a quick refresher if you don't know what that means. It's an semi-automatic mode where you are telling your camera that you're going to lock down your aperture. Remember the aperture is the opening of your lens that lets them light. We're going to lock it down to F eight. That gives us enough depth of field, which we want in real estate photography to have most of your scene in focus, especially with wide-angle lenses, you'll generally get a lot in focus compared to a more telephoto lens. But with a wide angle lens at F8, most likely the whole room will be in-focus, which is good. What that means is your camera is then going to use the shutter speed and ISO and automatically adjust those to set exposure and get a generally exposed photo. We also want to lock down our ISO depending on the camera, it might change how you do this when you're on aperture priority mode. Sometimes within the settings you can tell your camera, I only want to go up to ISO, whatever you want, 200, 400, 800 during any automatic mode. And other cameras, you can manually set both settings, so an aperture and then manually set your ISO to the lowest setting, which I would recommend. So ISO 100, if you can, some cameras, the lowest is one-sixth times it's 200, whatever the lowest ISO is for you set that. And then it leaves the shutter speed to move around from one-sixtieth of a second to one-two thousandth of a second to half a second to be able to expose your photo properly. Your exposure compensation is another important setting. So this is a setting if you haven't played around with this, It's really key to use for real estate photography. Because what you're basically telling your camera, if you use that, normally it's set to zero and your cameras just going to get a general exposure. But if you bump that exposure compensation up to plus one, for example, it's forcing your camera to say that you want your photo to be brighter. And generally we want bright, open airy photos with our real estate photography. So I'll use that exposure compensation dial to force the camera to expose a brighter image that I like. Or if you're doing bracketing manually, you can adjust your exposure compensation up and down so that it will automatically expose like minus one exposure compensation, zero exposure compensation, or plus one exposure compensation. That being said, there's most cameras have an automatic bracketing mode, which will do this automatically. I know this is a lie if you're new to photography, but FAA aperture ISO 100, and then let your shutter speed go up and down to expose properly. In terms of shooting raw vs JPEG, I always use raw. I think you get more room for editing. Sometimes you don't even need to do bracketing when you're shooting raw because you have so much information there that you can bring up the shadows, you can bring down the highlights a bit. And so you don't need to worry about combining multiple images. But the file sizes are large. And if you're taking thousands of photos a week doing your job, then it can get quite daunting to be able to organize, manage all of those files. And to be honest with real estate photography, you could get away with jpegs. Jpegs for most new cameras are super high-quality. You can still edit them. But I always err on the side of caution and I like shooting raw. But if you are using JPEG, make sure it's on the extra fine. The largest file size, resolution, quality mode that your camera offers in terms of drive mode, drive motors, that setting where you're choosing things like setting a self timer, you're doing burst mode, those kinds of things. Either you're just shooting a single photo or you're using bracketing mode. As I mentioned, bracketing mode generally is a setting where the camera will automatically take three photos. One exposure, stop apart, one lower, one, perfect exposure, and then one above. And again, the reason to do that is in different situations, parts of an image, parts of the room might be in more shadow or might be brighter. And just taking one photo won't be able to get that dynamic range, that range of exposures, right? And so you can take different exposures to be able to expose to the shadows, to expose to the brighter parts of a room. And then you can combine all of those photos and post-production and it creates a nice, evenly lit photo for Focus mode. Set it to a wide mode. You can usually change the mode to be like a specific point, like a focus point, like it'll be a little box that sometimes you can even move around with the joystick or the touchscreen on the back of your camera. And just having it in the center wide generally is the best option. If you have it as a too small of a focus area and you're accidentally in the bottom left of the corner of the frame. It might focus on like a couch or something that's in the foreground of the frame rather than what's in the middle, which is generally better. So wide focus mode for white balance. I find that most cameras are great nowadays, I would just do auto unless you start to have issues, especially in rooms where you have really warm light from some ambient lights from the room like lamps. And then you also have exterior natural light coming in. That's really bright. Daylight temperature, different light temperatures. If that's being an issue for you, you might want to set your white balance manually, but I find that auto white balance is great. If you're shooting in raw mode, you have so much room to be able to adjust the colors and match different frames because you can run into issues when you are doing. What I'll again referred to and continuously remind you is the ambient method of taking photos. It's a combination of flash and ambient photos. Combining those color temperatures from the flash, from the ambient light can be a little bit problematic in situations. If you're using auto mode, but I'll just start on auto mode and adjust accordingly within your camera, there's often a setting to set a level and a grid. Often it's like a thirds grid that will have two lines vertically, two lines horizontally. And this is very important because we want Level straight photos and you can use that grid to be able to line up things in your image like a door frame, like a fireplace wall, like a window frame, to be able to get those lines straight up and down, which is so key to real estate photography. Sometimes this can be a little bit hard, especially if we're using a super wide angle lens, you get a little bit of warping on the edges of frame, but you can often fix that in post to some extent. So don't worry about that too much. But try to get the best straight photo in camera as possible. And using the thirds grid and the camera level is super key to doing that. Alright, thank you so much for watching this lesson. And the next one we'll talk a little bit briefly about using a smartphone 4. Can You Use a Smartphone for Real Estate Photography? Pros & Cons: In this lesson, I want to talk about using a smart phone and go a little bit deeper for those interested in using one, you might want to skip this if you're not using a smartphone. This is really for those real estate agents taking this class, landlords, short-term rental host, who don't want to invest in a lot of equipment. I'll talk about the benefits and drawbacks of using a smartphone. So first off, benefits, the quality is getting better on smartphones and certain smartphones, the quality of an image kind of matches what a basic DSLR mirrorless professional camera I can do. It's more affordable because you probably have a smartphone in your pocket. It's easy to think, oh, I'm just going to whip this out and take great photos. And sometimes you can, it's simple to use. There's no complicated settings are things that you'll need to know. It's basically just being able to set up in an area, compose it the right way, and take the photo. Just click the button to take the photo. The problem is that most smartphones don't capture RAW photos as good as basic DSLR or mirrorless cameras. So what this means is that you don't have a lot of room editing and you don't necessarily need to edit all your photos too much to look good. But in terms of things like combining images and things like that and the photos will just look better if you edit them. And not having nice high-quality photos from a smartphone limits your ability to edit them the right way. The other issue is when we're getting a little bit more professional, using just flash alone. Sinking up a flash to a smartphone is very difficult. There's not really great tools to do that right now. So you can just use the Flash that's on your smartphone to get enough lighting. Potentially, you could use continuous video lights to light a scene LIDAR room, and use a smartphone to make it look good. But when we're talking about more advanced techniques using a flash or a strobe where we're bouncing it off the ceiling. We're maybe taking multiple images where we're bouncing it off different parts of the room, that flamboyant style, then it's going to be practically impossible with a smartphone. Also just like setting up on a tripod, not impossible, but more difficult using a trigger, self timer, bracketing all of these things are going to be more difficult with a smartphone. That being said, you can certainly take great photos with a smartphone. But as a professional photographer, you'll want professional gear. Truly, even though you as a photographer might be able to take a great photo with a smartphone. You don't want to show up to a professional photo shoot at a house, taking photos with a smartphone. Nothing against smartphone, smartphone photographers, It's just not going to look good, even if you promise, I'm going to take photos just as good with this camera. You'll want to actually have professional gear. As a professional. In this class, I will do some tests to show you the smartphone versus the professional camera and how they ended up looking. But I just wanted to share these thoughts before we move forward. 5. How to Compose Real Estate Photos - The Basics: In this lesson, you'll learn the basic process to taking great real estate photos. So let's get into it. The first thing is generally you shoot from the corner of the room. This is where you're going to stand and get the best view of the entire room as much as possible. Things to look out for are that lens distortion. So on the edges of a wide angle lens, sometimes things start to bend a little bit. So if you have things like photo frames, TVs, doorways, window frames, just pay attention. If it looks super weird, you might need to adjust while you're there taking the photos. Because while some of this can be fixed in post production, sometimes it doesn't, It's a bit hard to do well. And so readjusting your frame, panning to the left or right or choosing a different corner of the room is maybe the best idea. You want to start with the camera at waist height. I find that this is a great level for a lot of rooms, like your living space, bedrooms. The time you might want to raise the height of your camera is when you're in places like the kitchen bathrooms where you have countertops, you don't want the frame to be like right here at countertop level, you want to see those countertops. You want to potentially see over those countertops to be able to see things like the oven range or the bathroom sink or the toilet or whatever it is. And so lifting up the height of the camera, there is probably a good idea, but still probably about chest level depending on how tall you are. But maybe you're on that four to five foot mark is pretty good. You generally don't want to be like shooting down or shooting up at a room. If you are in a big great room, similar to what I'm shooting in today. You might want to raise it as well if you have super high ceilings. Here's a couple of examples of that. So here in this room, you're probably a little bit higher than waist level. To see over the bathtub. The photographers is probably standing in the bathtub for this example. To be able to see the countertop, to see those sinks and not be eye level with them. Here's another example where we're a bit higher in this photo to be able to see those countertops and to see what's beyond those countertops. I mentioned this before, but you want to make sure your camera is level. Look for straight lines vertically and horizontally, but more importantly vertically, you want lines of door frames, window frames, picture frames to be vertical. Choose one of the most important lines in your frame to be your guide post and make sure that that one is locked down vertical. If other ones fall slightly, not vertical, that's okay. We're going to again show how you fix some of these things in post-production. Here we have a bedroom where that window frame, the corner of the room is often a good thing to use as a straight line. But even the corner on the right, the corner in the background in the middle, and then on the left we have it looks like a doorway, maybe on the very far left, that might be like an arm moire or something. All of those vertical lines are perfectly up and down. And then you might not be a designer, but I find that as a real estate photographer, It's your job to make the room look as good as possible. So clean up things, make it simple. That's probably the best rule is if there's too much clutter, just remove it. You can take it out for the photo, put it back, clean stuff up, things like pillows that are on couches, bed, make sure those are fluffed, looking good as much as possible and you're going to get better at this. And sometimes you might be taking photos of empty spaces, so you might not run into this issue. But if you are photographing spaces that already have furniture, this is super important. And then also look for reflections in windows and glass picture frames. If you're in that reflection. Again, it's possible to remove some of this stuff in post-production, but it's going to be so much easier if you could take a photo without those reflections, you the photographer, and then also when you're shooting with a flash, if you have stands, if you have a flash off the camera, pay attention to that, showing up in a reflection as well. Here's a couple of examples of rooms that just look nice, clean. Those books look perfectly positioned on that shelf. You can tell this was sort of a tough room to shoot in because you're crammed in this corner with the crib and the dresser, but still you get the general sense of the whole room. Here's an example of a bathroom using that tile as the line, the vertical lines to keep straight. But you might want to just remove things if there's clutter on the sink, if there's toilet paper, if there's trash cans in the room, maybe just remove that stuff while you're taking the photo. So those are the basics. In the next lesson, we'll talk more about lighting 6. Lighting Basics for Real Estate Photography: Let's talk about lighting. In future lessons, you're going to see all of this in demonstration mode, me in the rooms doing this. But first, let's learn the basics. There are three basic types of light to understand you have your natural light. This is the sunlight coming in through windows and doors. You have your house lights, also known as the ambient lights. These are the ceiling lights can lights, fans, lamps in the background can do whatever is in your room from the house itself. Those are your ambient lights and then artificial lights. These are your flashes, your strobes, your video lights that you're using in terms of taking photos, there's a few options. So first you can do just a natural lights off approach. This is just light coming in from the outside. You can see that light, bright enough, clouds went by. And this video itself is getting a little bit brighter as I record this. So that's just using the natural light. You can also have the lights on. So of course you're going to be getting the natural light from the window, but I'm going to call this the ambient light shot. This is where you turn on the ceiling lights or any lights in the room, and then you have the combination of that. So taking that step further, lights on in the room and then you're adding flash. And this is called flamboyant. What's the comparison between lights on or off with it off? You're going to get that much more natural style. It's going to be the color temperature of natural light. You're not dealing with a combination of different color temperatures, which can be nice. And this is more of a designer look, think of like a Pottery Barn catalog. Go to their website and look at photos. You'll see that this is a very nice style. However, this is not possible. And a lot of homes, because most homes don't have big bright, airy windows that let in enough light to get that sort of style. Here's an example of that. These big windows taken at the right time of day where you, all you need is that natural light to make this room look amazing. And that goes to say that sometimes you're locked down at a particular time of day. I wish that you could pick the time of day the shoe and you should try to, and you might need to go to a location, go to a house at different times of day depending on if it's a north facing, south facing, west, east, depending on what rooms are facing, which direction at that time of day, you'll need to pay attention to it. You don't want harsh shadows in your shots. One of the reasons I'm shooting this video in this room right now is because while I do have north-facing windows here in California, meaning I'm not going to have a ton of direct sunlight into this room. I do get direct sunlight in the morning, and I don't want those harsh shadows for this video shot. Similarly, I would take these real estate photos at this time as well. Let's talk about lights on. This is a common approach. This is the style that you'll see for most real estate photographers, and this is what we're going to be covering in this class. You turn on the ambient lights if they add something to the room. Sometimes this means leaving the can lights on the ceiling off, just turning on lamps and life that actually look good. Generally though we're going to be turning on everything unless it's something that detracts from the room. So if it's like a weird off-putting light, too harsh to too warm, you might not want it. But generally, we're going to be turning on most of the lights. Here's an example of that, where the photographer is shooting with the ambient lamps in the background, as well as the natural light. And it looks like some flash potentially as well. Here's a shot where ceiling light, lamps are on, even though they probably don't add a ton of light, it creates this overall style to the photo. Here we have all the lights on. We've got the pendant lights on over-the-counter. Ireland, we've got the lights by the oven. We've got the lights in the background and the ceiling. Even in the bottom right, you can see on that countertop you have some lights underneath the upper cabinets, which just adds a little pop to this photo. This one, you can see really the contrast between the exterior natural bluish daylight versus the warmer interior lights. There's ways we're going to be able to fix this and post that. We don't have this weird color casts that are competing. We're going to want it to look a little bit more natural and cohesive. But this example shows the combination. Here. Even in this photo, the light is on. You can't even see it except in the reflection of the mirror, but you have that one can light on. And it just adds a little bit of light even though the photographer is definitely using your flash as well to light up this interior space. So right now I want to show you an example of one space. Then I'm going to photograph later in this course with the lights on, lights off so you can see the difference. So here it is with the lights off, supernatural nice-looking photo in here it is with the lights on, ambient lights overhead. And here's a side-by-side comparison. Totally different style. I think that lights add a lot to this. And you'll see a lot more of this in the live demonstrations in the future of this class. Now let's put it all together into the flamboyant shot. So what does this actually mean? I know I've already said that. It's a photo where you're shooting with your flash. You're also shooting with the ambient lights on. But in terms of technically how what photos do we need to take? You have to take one photo with just ambient lights, no flash, so just the ambient lights on. Also, of course you're getting natural light from the window size shot one. You're then turning on your flash and taking a photo with the flash. Sometimes this is multiple photos depending on how big the room is. Then oftentimes you're shooting what's called a window pole. And this is a photo exposed to the exterior window. You can see behind me that the window is quite overexposed. If I exposed to that window, everything inside this room would be too dark to expose and you don't want to do that. You want to generally exposed to the interior of the room. But what's called the window pole is where you're exposing to what's outside. And you'll see this code through Zillow. Go look on Airbnb, look at other real estate photographers. This is a very popular style. Here you can see some examples of this where this is not a naturally occurring photo with one frame. The photographer is exposing to the interior and then taking a separate photo exposed to the exterior. Or doing some heavy editing of a raw photo, depending on the situation, but oftentimes it's a separate photo that's later combined. Now you only want to do this if it adds something to the photo. If it's cells that room more. If you are taking something and there's like a trash truck or just like a weird building outside. You probably want to overexpose that photo. You don't want to show what's outside. Here's an example of where this is an exterior patio, but this is likely a combination of two photos. If not, it might just be a raw photo or a bracketed photo. But an example of where we are exposing to the interior lights on using a flash as well. And then we're also getting a shot exposed to the exterior because it adds so much what's outside that balcony. There is a technical approach to how we actually shoot these to be able to combine it later on in post that's coming up in the next lesson. 7. The Window Pull: How to Make the Exteriors Pop: Let's talk more about the window pole. So a reminder, this is exposing to the exterior of a window door, anything where you can see the outside. It's not overexposing, blowing it out. That's a term that I'll use to mean overexposing. You wanna do this if it adds to the story of your photo. Here's an example of a photo where the photographer did not do a window pole. There probably wasn't much outside to look at. And so she just decided to totally overexposed, which is a great call. Here's an example where of course you want to show what's outside of that window, this beautiful skyline. You don't want to overexpose it. You want to be able to see it. It totally cells this room. So how do you capture these photos? Either one, you just simply take a separate photo that's exposed to the outside. So you adjust your exposure compensation or manually adjust your settings so that what's outside exposed, this is a little bit harder to combine. Then the other option is you set the flash directly at a photo and you'll see me do this in the demonstration. You exposed to the outside, the flash overexpose is the frame of a window and it's actually much easier to combine some quick tips photoshop to do that after the fact. So a reminder, the flamboyant style we're going to be covering for a lot of our rooms are an ambient photo exposed to the interior, a flash plus ambient light exposed to the interior. Sometimes this could be multiple photos if it's a big room and you need to balance the flash off multiple areas of the room. You're going to do a window pole exposed to the exterior. And then something I didn't mention before is some repair shots. This can be if you are in the reflection of a mirror or of glass anywhere in the frame of your photo. So that is the window poll 8. RAW vs. JPEG Photos - Which Should You Shoot?: Is one photo enough? This is a very common question that I get about real estate photography, so I wanted to cover it again. Here is one photo enough compared to bracketing? One photo is great because it's simpler. You don't need to worry about combining files later on. And if you're going for a natural looking photo, just using natural light, if you're not going to be editing and doing the flamboyant style or a bunch of post-production, then you might as well get away with just shooting one raw photo. That's much easier, but bracketing is great if it is difficult to get an even exposure of an entire room. We've talked about this before and also when flamboyant style is not possible. So if you don't have a flash, if the room just doesn't lend itself to using a flash, if it's not going to add a bunch to that photo and make it look better. Sometimes just doing bracketing is good enough 9. Key Lesson: What Photos Do You Need to Capture?: What photos do you need to capture for a real estate photography shoot? You are taking the viewer through a tour of the house, make those connections with your photography. This is probably one of the most important things to take away from this lesson. Beyond just, you need to take XYZ number of photos per room. Remember, you're taking viewers through a tour. Without video. Have you have video? That's great. But if you're not doing video, then it's important for viewers to be able to sense, okay, I can go from this room to room. This is how the kitchen connects with the living space. This is how the primary bedroom connects to the bathroom. All of those kinds of things that are helpful as a viewer. So that's one of the first things when you walk into a space, makes sure that if there's open hallways, if there's open rooms and walls that connect the kitchen to the living space, you want to make sure you show those. But in terms of the basic for each room, I recommend at least one wide shot. Obviously this is the basics. You just need, at least one wide shot. You generally want to show two angles per room. So this is oftentimes from opposite corners. So you can see the entire room. If you go from one corner to the opposite corner, get a wide shot. You've got that whole room covered. Sometimes you might want to go for what's called a one-point or flat perspective. If there is a wall or something in the room that caters to this. Some examples of this are this great sink and the mirrors. It looks great having this one flat perspective where you're shooting perpendicular to a wall. Here's another example of where you're not shooting from the corner of a space. But this is taken from a flat perspective. Here's another one. It's a definitely a little bit more of a designer look where there's art on the wall, although you can see the reflection of this photographer's camera in that painting. So you want to be careful of that. It's harder to do that. Get rid of reflections or not be in a reflection if you are shooting in flat perspective. Now let's go room by room and talk about how many photos you need for each room. This is just a general rule of thumb. You might take 510 photos per room, but in terms of delivery or if you are selling space yourself, this is generally what real estate agents want. So you'll want fork photos of a kitchen. The kitchen sells the house a lot of times, especially if it's a nice kitchen, of course, you'll want for photos of that. And this isn't just going to be just wide-angle photos from corners. Potentially, you're going to have more detail shots of certain appliances that are Silva space. Again, for bathrooms, you'll want to photos of each bathroom. For bedrooms, one is generally enough, but take them from opposite corners if you can. Two of the primary bedroom. So this is the main biggest bedroom of the house. You want to have two of those. You want to have your laundry room. You want to have I would say more than one photo for the big living spaces. This is another selling point of a lot of houses. So having multiple photos of that and then one of any other rooms. So if there's offices, dance basements, that kind of thing, even a garage, you'll want to have at least one photo of that. Here's an example of two different photos of the same space. The one on the left is great because you can see what's outside that window. And that's probably the selling photo of this room. But the one on the right shows that connection between the kitchen and the dining space, which you don't see in that photo on the left. Here's a great photo showing the connection of the dining space to the living space, to the kitchen. The open concept, very American thing that is very popular now, I'm not sure if it's as popular around the world. Let me know if it's a thing yet. But this photo is great for showing that connection of the room, but it's not a great photo of each individual room itself. You'd want to have specific photo of the kitchen, of the living space, of the dining area as well. Here's another one that shows that connection of the living space to what's beyond the dining room and the kitchen. So that's what these examples are. Just examples of showing those connections of the room and then beyond those wider connection shots, which might be in addition to the photos of each room, then you might be getting photos of specific details of a room. So for this example, it looks like there's an office setup in a bedroom. That's kinda cool to show. This would be more, I don't know if for selling the house, but more for a short-term rental that you might want to show. Here's a photo of the pantry. Here's a photo of a bathroom. From this perspective, you don't see the tub. So you'd want to make sure you flop over and get the photo of the tub itself as well. But this perspective, you see that there is a tub there which is great. And then you also see the main visual details of a bathroom which are generally the sinks, the shower as well. Here's a more flat one-point perspective of a kitchen, showing the general space of the kitchen You're not getting a great shot of the oven here. I would also probably try to widen out or backup if possible in this photo so that you can see more of that space on the right. You don't see what this room is connected to. This is actually an example of a photo. I'm not a huge fan of because while you're seeing the space of the kitchen, sometimes when you get a little too close to the countertops, it just looks they take up too much space in the photo, which is unnecessary. I probably would have if I just wanted the photo of the kitchen gone back to the right a bit and just angled it a little bit more from more of the corner to see that oven range to see. And you would still see the cabinets, the fridge, the sink as well. Sometimes it's better though to take a photo from that perspective instead of the corner of a room. And this is an example of that where it's nice to be able to see straight down this galley kitchen. You still see the details, the left and the right. But you're centered on what the highlight of this photo is and that is that window and the little breakfast dining that's in front of the window. Here's a photo that I'm not a huge fan of. I'm showing you the pros cons what I like, what I don't like about certain photos. I like that you can see the range. It's highlighting, the oven range and then also the backsplash. But it's kinda like wanting to do too much. They're trying to show also on the left it looks like an island, but and then the sink is sort of squished over to the left side of the frame. I would have rather just backed up and gotten the whole photo with the island with oven range, with the sink and the window that's on the left. Because right now this photo is seems like it's just trying to highlight the oven, the range, and the backsplash. But if you're gonna do that, just just flatten out and take that photo rather than try to do everything. We talked about the interior of the house. Let's talk about the exterior of the house. Generally, you're going to be shooting at eye level outside, not at waste because the space is just bigger. You're taking photos of the house, it's bigger. So you're gonna be shooting at eye level. You're going to capture with three wide photos. One from the left, one from the right, and then one centered on the house itself. And these are going to be wider photos of the entire house. Then you're going to pop in and go a little bit closer to the entrance of the house and get that door. And if it's connected to a porch or a patio that's on the front. You wanna do that and then back up even further and get sort of a property line photo where you can see a little bit of the edge of the property and maybe even the buildings are houses on the side depending on what the neighborhood looks like. Of course, just to give it more context of what's that space look like. So here's some examples of that from the left, right center. These are a bit far back on that left and right. I might have gone in a little bit closer. That one on the right is nice, but see how that one on the right, you're the photographer is closer to the curb and you really see just the walkway up to the house, the one on the left. You're seeing mostly the street. You don't really need to see that. And I would have tilted up a little bit on those two shots, the left and the right, because the top of the house is being a little bit cut off. But a good example of getting that left, center and right shot. Here's an example of that left front shot as well. These houses are really close together. One of the things that I'll talk about is trying to show the depth of the house, if you can, from those angled shots. That's why we get those angled shots, as well as the Center on shot to be able to see that depth as well. Here you can see a little bit better of the depth of the house on that left side of the frame. Here is back at this photo or this house. This is a good example of the whole house photo. And then also that popping in close to the entryway, I might have even gone a little bit closer to highlight that porch or taken a separate photo of that porch as well. Here's a great photo showing the depth of a house. And this one probably just makes this highlights the house better than just straight on. Of course, you want to take both of those photos as well. Here's a straight on photo just to show you the difference of what a straight on photo looks like, here is one that's a little bit closer up as well, showing that entryway. Here's one of the entryway itself. Another thing to consider when you're taking exterior photos is the lighting. So you don't have as much control of the lighting in some sense because you're dependent on the sun, if and the weather. How the weather is that day will determine what your photo looks like. That being said, you can try to take your photos at different times of the day to highlight your house. So here is a great shot of this house, which at night with all the lights, with these big great Windows. It really is a selling point for this house. This might not work for a lot of houses. They might not have the big windows that show the interior of the space. At dusk during this light blue hour, which is the time right after sunset, and also the cloudy sky looks a little ominous. So if I were taking this photo and you had the option to take it again a different day when it wasn't cloudy, but this nighttime sky is pretty cool. So then we've got our exterior different shots, but we need the backyard shots as well. If there is a backyard, so same thing. Left, right, center from eye line, you want to get that of the house. So the left, right, and center, but then you want to backup, go to the corners of the property. If there is a nice backyard space and get that whole backyard connected to the house from those corner. This is gonna be different on any, every home. I'm talking about like a typical American suburb where it's just like a box. But of course this is going to look different if you're somewhere else in the world. If you're taking photos of an apartment building, if you're taking a photo of a big farmland rural area, but generally just photos that show the backyard space plus the house. If they have that space, then one photo for each feature of the backyard. So if there's a pool, a deck, patio, garage, etc. Taking photos of those individually and highlighting those is important. Here is an example of the same house that we've seen, the front from the one on the left. This is a photo from the back corner of the property. And then the one on the right, this is from more close to the house, but it shows the backyard space connected to the garage which we haven't seen or that garage granny flat ADU kinda thing you see in the back. That's a nice perspective as well. So if there is a feature in the backyard that you want to highlight, make sure you're highlighting that here. They even took a photo from across the alley as well to show that entrance to the garage, which is kinda neat to have. Here is a great patio. These are just photos of features you want to showcase. The pool and the pool is connection to the house. Here's another photo taken later in the day where the lighting within the house really highlights the house. But of course, this is a house again, big open windows, lots of light from the interior that really highlights that house not going to work for a lot of properties. This is a great little selling point to an Airbnb short-term rental, or even to selling a house. But this great little patio gazebo type thing, very good to highlight if you are shooting with a drone. I want to cover this really quickly. So aerial drone photos, I'll use that term interchangeably. Ariel is really just any photo taken from the sky. Drone is with a drone. You generally want to have one photo of the front of the house, one of the backyard, and then also a neighborhood location shots. So this might be one that's zoomed out quite a bit where it sort of pinpoints where the property is in the context of the neighborhood. Especially if it's close to any sort of cool feature like nature. If it's close to the mountains, if it's close to the downtown area of a certain town, being able to connect the dots. Here's the location to that cool feature of the town with a photo is you're very, very cool. Alright, with all that being said, I think it's time to get started with some photo demonstration. So in the next lessons, I'm going to be taking photos of the interior space of my house that I live in. I'm very lucky enough to have a house that I think is worthwhile photographing. And it'll be a good example of a common approach of taking photos with furniture in them, already stylized, got photos on the wall, things like that. So there might be things where you might not run into with the photos on the wall. You generally don't want to have family photos in your real estate photos. But in the future lessons, I'm also going to be taking photos of another space without any furniture, which will be completely different in terms of the approach of taking the photos, much more simple. And also for editing the photos a little bit easier as well. So looking forward to that, and we'll see you in those lessons. 10. Basic Room Photo Demonstration with Flambient Technique, Natural, and Flash: Welcome to this lesson, which is going to be a perfect one to refer back to because I'm basically going over the entire standard process that I recommend for real estate photography. And this is for an office, but this could be a bedroom, this could be a kitchen, this could be a bathroom, really, any type of room. The same elements that I'll walk through will apply. And also in this lesson, I'm going to be comparing and showing the differences in the different lighting styles in more depth, including a ambient plus flash, flash ambient. And then also using the flash with a filter to get more of a natural look. If you want to go for that sort of natural style lighting without a room, with a lot of natural light being led in. Right now you can see from this view of my camera that I'm in a corner. I'm at my standard sort of waist height, a little bit higher for me, I'm back in as almost as far as I could and I've leveled everything and I'm just trying to get this side of the room. You can see that I have a window open and I have this curve in here that I could close down. I think it depends on what the room is. If you have a room where, you know, you're going to do a window pole, then you might not want the curtain to be closed. And so for this room, I like what's outside the window, it's a lot of green. And so we're going to be doing a window, Paul. But if you have something outside the window where you don't really like it and there's curtains, maybe close those creditors down if they're sort of sheer curtains like this. So I think that looks pretty good. I'm just looking at the composition. We're seeing pretty much everything. There's a reflection in this poster over here. Let me see if there's anything I can do. Sometimes just like tilting up or down will help. Then also, since that didn't seem to be helping, let's just turn off this light and see if it's really adding much to the room. I think for this case, for our ambient shot, we'll keep that off. So let's go through the basic process of the typical photo that I would recommend, which is the flamboyant style. The first photo we're going to be taking is with the natural light coming in from the window, as well as the ambient lights. Now there's one light I didn't turn on, which is a total game changer. And that's this one here. Because that totally changes the vibe of the room with that little light there. And so having that on is gonna be really nice. So from over here I'm just double-checking, making sure everything looks good. Now this is my office, so there's some things that might look a little bit better if I take down like this little light right here. It's kind of ugly. So I'm actually going to, it's going to take 2 s to take this off. So that looks better. This plant is a little awkwardly coming into the frame. I like the plant. Oh, yeah. That's way better, at least in my opinion. So I'm gonna take one photo right here. Let's make sure our focus is pretty good. Okay, so our focus is good. We are at F8, as always, ISO one-sixth, and then our shutter speed is what is determining our exposure. So we're at 1.5 of a second right here on the app. It just shows it as two, but there's one-half. So we're going to stay right about there. Like one-half is pretty good. So let's take this picture. So this is our first photo, the first layer. Now let's turn on our flash. Then we're going to do a window poll. But first I just want to look at that photo with the flash and compare it. Yeah, that's pretty good. I might take another one higher power. I was at one eighth power. And this is really just highlighting, adding a little bit of contrast to all of our furniture. That's going to look really good, especially for the shelf over here. Now let's drop our exposure so we're increasing our shutter, leaving all of our other settings the same. Got some nice greenery out that window. And we're just going to point our flash right at that window. And we're going to take this photo. And that was a little bright. Let's drop that power just a little bit. There we go. Let's try one more. I think I might've got a little reflection in there. That was worse. So let's go over here. Cool. That looks good. Okay, so that is our basic setup. We've got our room with the ambient lights on. We have the flash bounced off the ceiling and then we have our window poll. What if we want a different style? Let's go ahead and try to get a more naturally Just natural lights style. I'm gonna put my flash down. I don't need that for anything. Now, if we were gonna do that, we would turn off our overheads. I'm not 100%, wow, look at that white balance on that shot. I'm not 100% sure about the ambient light right there. It's so nice to have that little bit of ambiance in there for this room. But I think for this style, the all-natural light, Let's turn it off. That's just giving more of that natural look. We're gonna be completely over exposing the outside and all take one with it exposed to show you what it looks like in post combining it. But this is probably that natural style you might want to go for. So I'm going to take this shot. Now that's a two-second shutter. That's why you need to try hip-hop. And let's do one where we are exposing to the outside right here. This time I'm not using a flash, so we'll be able to combine those images, but it'll just be a little bit of a different process. So that's our natural shot. Now if you want a little bit more of a naturally lit scene and you want to use a flash, I would recommend using an umbrella or some sort of diffusion. So here I have my umbrella, which has the filter on the front. Within it. There's a silver background of the umbrella. So all the light from this flash is going to bounce and then be diffused through the white. If I didn't want it to be diffused or spread out so much, I could take off this filter and that might look okay. But I'm just trying to get it as natural as possible. So natural light is generally spread out. And so I'm going to just do it something like this. Now you watching this, you're in this frame, but I'm just gonna do a test shot just to see what this looks like. I'm going to underexpose just a hint because I know I have my flash and turn this up to full power. Let's take this shot. And because our shutter is so slow, that might not work well. So what I'm going to do is actually for this case, I'm going to boost my ISO just a little bit to 1.5 of a second. And I boosted my ISO to 800, which should be fine for this camera. You have to know your camera and know how much noise you're getting with an increased ISO. But so that the camera shutter syncs with the flash, you might need a faster shutter. So let's just take a test shot. And that's pretty bright. Okay, So actually I'm going to decrease that. We don't need it that high. We still want that half shutter though. Something like That's looking pretty good. So here we are. I'm gonna move you now. So you're like right in front of that flash, but you're out of the way. So let's take this shot. I'm going to raise up the flash. Let's do that one more time. Alright, so now if we look at these photos and I see a little weird shadow coming from the door frame. So what I might do is try one where the flash is coming from right behind the camera. If possible. We don't have a lot of room in here. Now I'm just holding it up so there's gonna be light coming from behind the camera. And that's pretty good. We're getting a lot more light. This room was a little bit too dark to have a totally naturally lit shot because then everything is getting overexposed. So adding some light with this flash, reflected and filtered looks pretty natural actually. So you can see the difference that I'll put up on the screen. So that's that photo and that's the process that I would do for pretty much any photo. Next, I'm going to pick a different corner and take another photo. Typically I would like to go to the opposite corner so that we can see what's on this side of the room. So I would probably pick that corner unless I want to go for that corner if my camera is wide enough to be able to see what's behind me, which is a closet, which is nice to see. But I want to see the opposite side of the room with the door opening to the hallway. Again, visualizing, giving a map of the environment as we take our photos and as someone's looking through them. So now I'm in the opposite corner of the room and I think it's the best because I can see the entrance to the hallway as well as this other closet door, which is a nice highlight for the room. I have my ambient lights on. I'm gonna go ahead and turn on those hallway lights as well. So now we got a lot of light coming in and you can see that my camera, I actually push it behind this chair. I kinda cheated that chair up a little bit closer. So first, I'm going to take my just ambient shot. I think it's a little bit bright. Let's drop down to one-third of a second, and we'll take this shot. Then we'll take one with our flash. Cool, Nice. That's a pretty basic shot. It's not like the money shot of this room, but it's one that gives more context. All right, I hope this helps and we'll see you in the next video. 11. Introduction to this Demo: Hey there. Welcome to the live demonstrations of this course. So I thought it'd be fun to just break up the monotony of the lectures behind the slideshow with some actual in-house demonstrations. So whenever you see me wearing my hat, That's what it means. I'm going to be doing a live demo walking you through the entire process. So the first thing I thought would be good is to go over the kit that I'm using just as an example of what you might consider getting. And then I'm going to do a walk through of the house as if I was walking in for the very first time to talking about what I'm seeing, what I'm planning to photograph, how I'm planning to photograph. And then later throughout the course you're going to see me actually going room by room doing demonstrations. Alright, so let's go and look at my kit. 12. What Equipment is in my Real Estate Photography Kit?: In this demo, I want to show you the kit I'm using for real estate photography today. And I'll just talk about the equipment I'm using and briefly why I brought it with me today. So the first thing is the camera comes down to the most important thing that you need is a camera. I'm going to be photographing on a Fujifilm X t4. This is a crop sensor camera. And because of that, I've brought to lens options both primes. I do have a zoom lens, but I think I'm going to get away with these two lenses today. And this includes the Fujifilm 16 millimeter 1.4. Remember that we talked about the one-point for aperture not really being a benefit for real estate photography because we're going to be photographing at an eight. And then I also have the Sami Yang, 12 millimeter. And I wanted to test out this lens as an option for an affordable prime lens that has a super wide focal length. This is a manual focus lens, making it a little bit more affordable. But because it has such a wide field of view and we're going to be photographing in F eight. We shouldn't have a problem getting sharp focus. Now on top of this camera you see this thing. This is the flash trigger which combines with this one right here. This is the newer end W5 70. This is a kit that's a super affordable that you could find on Amazon or a lot of photography websites. And the reason that I have the trigger that's connected to the cameras so that I can have this off camera and it will trigger the flash for me. I brought my tripod. This is the Manfrotto be free tripod. It's carbon-fiber, super, super lightweight. So this will be super easy to move around. It's not a fluid head tripod, so not gonna be using it for video but for photography. It's great. Next to that you have a light stand. This is just a typical Stan. All of them are pretty good. This is for the flash. If I'm going to be using that and speaking up flash, I also have the light stand holder, which is this goat ox holder. So it's just the goat ox flash, external flash holder. So the flash pops and right here, you can clamp it down. Then we have an umbrella and some diffusion that goes in front of it. And I'm not going to put it on yet because I may or may not be using the umbrella with the diffusion for all my shots, it's going to depend. Sometimes I might just be bouncing off the ceiling because I'm in a house which is my house that has a lot of white ceilings, are all white ceilings. I might get away with just bouncing this off the ceilings. But if I want a different look, just more of a natural look, I might pop on the umbrella and just brighten up the entire area with that. So that's the kit and we'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Walkthrough of the House - Let's See What We're Working With: Alright, so what I'm going to do is just an actual walk through. I thought this would be interesting for you to see from my point of view, perspective what I'm thinking when I walk into a house. So let's just get at it. If I was entering this house for the first time, I obviously know this. It's my house. So I have a plan, an action plan already. But what I'm looking out for are, what are the rooms? What are the connections between the rooms? How is the light right now? So I'm just going to talk through what I'm seeing initially. So right off the bat, I see these great white big windows. I see this big, great living space. Looks amazing, but the light is falling a little bit harshly with the shadows over there. So I'm going to see if there's another room to start out with likely than just painting around, I'm just seeing what the rooms I see some cats have to get out of the photos. We got a little TV space right here. This might be a good one to start with, although it might be better just to wait for this entire open living space because we can do it all in one, go. Panning around. So we see some connections. These are things to keep in mind. So we have a connection to what's the kitchen, or we have the entry way which also has a connection to the kitchen. So when we're photographing, I'm just kind of walking through things that I'm thinking I'll be doing. I'll be taking some photos from this angle to show this entire space with that connection to the kitchen, to maybe even something from around this way with that connection to the entryway. So the viewer as they go through these photos, knows where they're at. Let's just take a look at the kitchen. So I I will admit that this is not how clean my house always is with three toddlers. This is nothing near how close it is. So I spent a lot of time last night and this morning cleaning up. But there are going to be things that I noticed like here we have a sticker chart for our children and that's going to have to get removed because that just pops and is too much color right there. Now if there were any dirty dishes, I might try to clean some of this stuff up here like the soap dispensers. It looks it's not necessarily dirty, but it's just a little bit too much clutter. The plants are fine. I might move around those plants just a little bit. Here are some money shots that we're going to be getting with the oven range, a little coffee bar over there and this table. But even like little things like this napkin holder, the salt and pepper shaker, not necessary to move, but might just clean it up just a little bit. And I'm already starting to think of, okay, we want our money shot of the entire kitchen, but we're going to want them money shot of just this breakfast as well. Something to think about as well. If you're doing photos for a short-term rental and not just for selling a property is you might need more photos of the features. A photo just something like this, but a little bit wider of the range isn't going to necessarily sell a house. I might do something a little bit wider like this, showing the full kitchen, and I'll do that as well, but for short-term rental, showing the range, showing that we have a mini fridge and a wine rack, a microwave, a dishwasher. These are things you want to show case in a short-term rental shoot. So think about those things. So turning around, we see this other connection to the living space. So we'll definitely want some wide spot now I'm kinda backed into a corner. I'll just show you really quickly right here. But I'm probably going to end up standing, maybe right around where these flowers are, or even back further. So I can get that full shot of from this side, the kitchen opening up to that living space. Here we have the laundry room laundry going to have to move that shoes preferably clean up just a little bit down there. We got a powder room and I'm noticing okay. So we've got this bathroom right here. The lighting is not terrible. It's a little bit bright. We have this light shining down there, so I'll probably wait to photograph this. Always going to close toilet seats, maybe even move some of that soap and stuff. That little basket just for the shoot. But looking good, we got a little play area over here. This is something that for perhaps like an Airbnb rental, this is something to photograph. But for selling a property, really, this should probably be cleaned up more. And that's just gonna be a little bit of a background shot. Now here's another money shot from the corner of the property or corner of the house where we're seeing the connection between the kitchen, What's the dining area and then the other living area with the TV. So we'll be taking one photo from here, again, waiting for the sun to move. And this is the importance of scouting a location ahead of time, or at least, at the very least, knowing where the sun is and the direction of the home. If you are south-facing, north-facing, depending on where you live. And knowing if there's going to be Windows, you've got to pay attention to that. So here's another bathroom and because we're on the other side of the house, this might be a good bathroom to photograph right now where we're just getting ambient light. Hello, watching for those mirrors. Got some toys down there. That's all stuff we're going to clean up, but this is a good room that we might start with. There's a couple of bedrooms I skipped for now. But here's the primary sweet and here is another room that might be a good one to start out with. It's a little bit bright coming through that window. But I think by the time we photograph the primary bathroom, which is in here, which does not have a lot of natural light. The lighting will look good in the rest of the house. So here's the primary bathroom. It's sort of a square and I'm going to turn on the lights so you can see what's going on. So the lighting looks pretty ugly right now what I'm going to do is take these towels out, take out the shampoo in the shower, the soap, all of that. Clean it up quite a bit. We've got a bowl a bowl water for the cats and dogs. So things like that. I'm just going to clean up. But anyways, I hope that you enjoyed this sort of walk through. I'll probably start with this bathroom when we get to the demos. And then depending on the lighting, I'll be moving on to the rest of the rooms. But I hope you enjoyed this little lock there and it gives you some ideas for what to look for when you are starting out at a house. Cheers 14. The Kitchen - Part 1: Welcome to our first live demonstration. And for this live demo, I wanted to take photos of the kitchen, which is generally one of the most important rooms, likely the most important room for any type of house, real estate photography. So I wanted to talk about the entire process from beginning to end. I'm going to be taking a lot of different angles, probably more than necessary, but I just want to show you all the different possibilities. Now this room has a ton of natural light. So this is a room that might lend itself to being a great photo with that natural light style. So we're going to do that. We're going to show you the difference between taking bracketed photos. We're going to do the ambient style and then the flash flamboyant style we're going to do at all here. The first thing I wanted to know, I want you to note is the settings I'm using. So I have my camera set on a manual mode, but you would likely be on an aperture priority mode where you are locking down your aperture which were at an F8. I have my lens manually adjusted so that it's about, we're a little past seven or 8 ft or so, and then it goes all the way to infinity. So everything is pretty much in focus. My ISO is the lowest this camera goes, which is ISO 160. And then my shutter is just bouncing around depending on if I want it to be brighter or darker. So right now I'm going to set it to auto just to show you what's happening. And let me actually just take a video of this so you can kinda see on my camera, I also have my level set up. So here's my level. You can see that green line, which means it's level. And then I also have this grid. You can kinda see the grid lines up and down, which are going to help me line up lines in my frame. Now with my shutter speed set to automatically, I can bump up my exposure compensation and you can see that I have a specific dial here. A lot of cameras, it's just going to be in the menu itself. But as I increase that, I can make it brighter. So this is perfect because it's automatically adjusting my shutter speed. Now I might not necessarily want to keep it on auto if I am doing my combination of shots, my manual shots, I flash shots, my ambient shots, my natural light shots, because I want them perhaps locked down my shutter speed and locked down my exposure. But for just getting a naturally lit shot, something like this looks pretty good. I don't mind the overexposed background, so I'm just taking that shot just so you can kinda see. And that's a one-point three-second shutter. Really long to get all of that light in. Because I'm shooting in RAW, I'm going to be able to bring up those shadows a bit, bring back the highlights a bit. Although I don't even necessarily want the highlights to be brought down. I liked that overblown. Look for this natural shot. Now I want to go through and just take one bracketed shot as well. And in my settings, it does have an option for changing the settings to expose your brackets one-stop over, one at zero and One-Stop under. And so when I hit this button, it's going to take three shots. Now let me record that because it's pretty cool. You can actually see what's happening. Let's record. It took three shots, which was pretty neat. And you'll all be in the settings section of this class. I'll be going through these photos, looking at the different combinations. What's better bracketed versus not for most of the rest of the shoe. I'm not going to be bracketing. I find that it's just a little bit too much work for myself. If you're just shooting in JPEG, I highly recommend bracketing. But if you're shooting in RAW, I would say one is enough, especially when you're combining the single photo with the ambient lights and the flash, just shooting single photos and Ra is perfect. I'm going to turn that back off to single shot as well. I didn't really talk about this angle, so this angle I chose first because we're seeing the entire kitchen. We're not getting a super highlights shot of some of the main features like the oven or the range. But it's an important shot to show the layout of the entire kitchen. You do see the fridge, you see the the dishwasher, you see in the distance there's a coffee bar and a little breakfast nook. You see the range in the back. So this is an important angle. So now that we have that natural shot. And what I wanna do too is I'm just going to take a photo with my iPhone and we will compare the difference. I'm basically getting the same angle. Now with this iPhone, I do have the option for with two lenses for the one times and then the 0.5 angle, which is a wider angle. So I'm trying to perfectly match this up. Okay, So let's take that one photo. I think my lens was a little bit wider so I can see the cabinets on the left and right in the other angle with my 12 mm Sam Yang, Here's the wide view which is honestly a little bit too wide. I feel like I don't get to see the background gets pushed farther. You can kinda see that when I'm zoomed in quite a bit, even though I can, I can still see the left and right Side which I want versus this, I'm kinda pushed even further and we can compare and contrast those photos in the post section as well. I'm going to be going through the raw photos from my camera versus the raw photos from my phone, talking about the different capabilities of editing. So if you're interested in shooting with a smartphone, definitely check out that lesson. Now let's get back to taking photos with this camera. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on my remote, which allows me to trigger my camera, which is good because I don't want it to be touching trigger when I'm taking the photo even touching this, I can tell it shakes the tripod a little bit. And even though we can line that up later in post, I just want to make it easy, simple. I'm going to take photos by pressing a button on my phone. And this will allow us to take the shots for our ambient shot with the ambient lights on and then also with our flash. Alright, so now we can see on my screen that we have a shutter speed of one half second, which is that's how it's represented here. We have the f-stop. It doesn't show it's an FAA and it doesn't show because this is a manual lens. It's a Sam Yang lens, which doesn't provide that information to my camera, but it has a dial on the front that I can see an F8 and then my ISO one-sixth. So what I'm going to do is now turn on our lights in here. And just little things like notice how there's little rug. I'm not sure if you'd see kinda pops up right there. I'm just going to pull it up just a little bit. So that's not pulling up. I want to make sure it's kinda like centered in this walkway. I'm going to turn on all the ambient lights in here. We got a bunch. These lights over here are a bit much so I'm going to, let's see if I bring down my shutter speed. That's looking pretty good. We have one more light. As the garbage disposal. There we go. That's looking pretty good. This is a much different photo than the one we saw before, which was of the natural light. But it's going to work out pretty good. So we're adding one-fifth shutter speed. I'm just going to tap the button and take one photo. Cool. The other thing too with the lights on, the exposure to the outside is a little bit better. It's not perfect, but it's better. Now I'm going to take my flash shot, not moving my camera. I already have my trigger on, which is good because I'm not going to even touch the camera here. I'm just turning on my flash. Now with the flash, I'm going to have to take a couple of test shots to see what power I want it. But right now I'm just going to aim it just up at the ceiling, about like two or 3 ft away from the ceiling. I'm going to go at full power so we can see the difference. I'm not really worried about what it looks like on the ceiling. I'm worried about what it looks like when it casts light onto what's in our scene. The appliances, the countertops to highlight those make those a little bit more contrasty. So here we go. Take this one photo. Cool. I'm gonna do it from this other angle because I noticed that there was quite a bit of a reflection on the refrigerator. So I'm thinking if I shoot from this side and I can go over here, I just don't need to be in the frame. It's going to look better. That looks pretty good. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to continue to move down this line. Now, I'm going to hop up on this countertop, hide myself. Another reason, this remote trigger is great. I can see when I'm on the camera or not. And shoot from over here with the flash that is, I'm about here. Don't wanna be in the frame. 123. Pretty good. So you can see that it's totally blowing out the ceiling. I might have been a little bit too close to the ceiling, so let's do that one again. But it's highlighting the countertops. It's highlighting the appliances and everything over here. So I'm gonna do, this is a long room, so I'm going to do one from way over here and you see me in this one. So of course I can cut myself out of this as well in post so I can mask myself out if I want. So I'm just gonna do that one. So this one, I'm just going to stand here because I want to highlight that oven range really well. Cool. And let's just take one more from over here, way in the corner. Cool. So that looks pretty good. Now what I'm going to do is since I'm over here, I'm going to get these window pulls. So I am going to actually be decreasing the shutter or increasing the shutter speed rather so that we are exposing for the outside. And that's good. You don't need to do the flash, but with the Flash does it's going to help a lot when we are editing these photos. Later on and masking around things. The window frame and these window frames are kinda clean, white light color, which is going to be super-helpful if there's curtains and things, It's a little bit harder but it will still work. But let me just show you. So I'll take, just for the sake of Education, I'll take one photo over here. Just like this, where we're exposing to the exterior. Now the flash was on but it is pointing this way, so it's not going to affect that photo. Now. I don't even like what's happening in the photo in the window that's on the right side of the frame, but I do like the green in the background and I'm just going to stand over here and point my flash right at the window. I'm going to be cut out of this part of the photo anyways. That was probably a bit bright, so I'm going to decrease my brightness back up just a little bit. There we go. Make sure I'm not in that reflection as well. And that's looking pretty good for this angle. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to move the cameras around to a different angle and walk through that different angle as well. 15. The Kitchen - Part 2: Alright, so here's the second photo that I'm going to get for the kitchen. And you can notice behind me that I have my tripod setup on the countertop itself. And that's one of the great things about this little Manfrotto. Be free tripod, you are free to move it around. It's super lightweight and let me just take a shot really quickly so you can kinda see what I'm working with. Again, if we want that natural look, my overexposed just a little bit. I don't want my flash on. Now I'm going to take a photo so you can see those grid, that grid line It's really nice to see in this photo and the grid lines don't show up on the app. So you can't really see that. This is another hero shot where I think it's a great shot to highlight one of the features of the kitchen, which is r to the features which is this range, and then also the breakfast and coffee bar area. So three features, all-in-one. This kitchen is a big kitchen, so it's nice to break it up into different areas for our photos. And I really like the look of this one. I use the grid to really try to make those lines straight. We've got the tile, we have the window, we have the doorway, these cupboards over here, all things that we can use to straighten out our photo. So let me connect to my camera so you can see what I'm working with. Alright, so now first I'm going to retake this photo with just a supernatural look. You also noticed that I am shooting up higher because I want to see the countertop as well. So let's just make it a little bit brighter. Bright and airy look something like that. Looks pretty good. I'm going to take this photo. Then you can see that the process is pretty simple once you start to get a groove of things. So I'm going to turn on these lights now. So those are all the lights in that room. And there are some overhead lights right above the camera. I'm going to turn on just because that's going to add a little bit of light to the the oven range. You can see that with them on versus off on. I think it gives a better presence to all of that light. So let's take this photo. We're at a shutter speed of, I don't want to be too bright, so shutter speed of one-fifth of a second. I am noticing some reflection on the countertop. Is that this light over here that I just turned on? Oh, no, that's probably that's these ones. So we're just going to have to deal with that. We might have to we might want to remove that in post, or it's okay to live with some little reflections. It is natural after all. So now I'm gonna get my flash shot. So it is again, holding my flash up right here at the ceiling. We are at half power. That's pretty good. Let's do one at full power just to have, alright. And then we'll take one from over here as well. Really highlighting this back area. And now we're going to get our window pulls. So we're going to increase our shutter speed. We are getting this weird reflection coming in from that window, which is just like the other window reflecting it. So let's see what happens when we do our window pole. This is a nice window to get as a window pole because it's nice and green out there. Not bad. I'm going to go from this angle. Hey, decrease our power just a little bit. It's a little bright. Cool. I'll be able to work with that. Alright, so that's it for this second angle of the kitchen. I'm probably gonna get one more looking this way at the kitchen. So turn everything around. Coming up next 16. The Kitchen - Part 3: Alright, so now I have this angle setup because I wanted to really highlight this side of the kitchen and I wanted to see also the space and how it works out. So in this shot, we can see everything. We can see the range from this side. We can also see the sink which we saw before. We can see the entryway, which is important to be able to show people where they are in the map of the house. And then we also see the countertop over here with a hint of open nis over there. Now I could kinda go a little bit more like this, but not really. I don't want to necessarily highlight the open kitchen, open area in this shot. I'm going to come around to this side shooting that way afterwards. But right now, this is still a kitchen highlight shot. So just making sure our lines are pretty straight. We are getting a little bit of warping on the edges. Like having these lights here on the right-hand side. Alright, cool. That's, that's pretty dang good. So we're gonna take this shot. We have all of our ambient lights on still for this shot. So let's just go ahead and take that shot. Now let's take our flash shots. Then I'll take one from down here with the flash. And they'll even take one from way over here in the entrance. Or if I get hot myself right here almost. Might have been too bright. This light over here I'm noticing is kinda nice in here. So I'll take one with that on and maybe we'll combine it. Cool. Now with this photo, I'm not sure if I'm going to want that window poll. I can't even see what's in that window right now. So what I'm going to do is just literally crank up my f, my shutter speed just a little bit. And there's really not anything I need from that window. So we don't need to do that. But what I do want to get is one more shot, just with natural light. I do think for our house, for these open rooms, the natural look actually works really well. So we'll see, and then the day which ones I actually prefer. I'm going to increase the exposure by decreasing the shutter speed just a little bit. And we'll take that shot. Nice, cool. Alright, so that's this angle. And then I think the last one I want, which we haven't really gotten a good shot of, is the countertop, the fridge. And then also from this angle here, looking into the open area of the living room and dining area 17. The Kitchen - Part 4: So here I am at this other angle where you can really see this side of the kitchen, the dining area into the living room. Now, my settings right now, I'm just going to take a shot. I'm at one-fifth of a shutter speed and the kitchen is a little dark. So I'm just going to boost that and see what happens with the photo. If I expose really to the kitchen itself one half. Actually, that's a two-second shot and not One-half. One-half. Yeah, that's right. Alright. My lines are a little bit straight, so let's straighten out those lines, just slow it. There are a lot of lines to pay attention to. Now, overexposing those windows right now is not a bad idea because from this angle, There's a construction project going. This is my house is I'm working on a tree house back there. And so overexposing is probably better than let me just show you what would happen if I did a window pole. Eventually, we'll have a nice sort of backyard area out there for photos. But for today, we're going to overexposed from this angle into the background backyard. So I think this looks pretty good, but I do want to get the ambient lights on. So that's including ambient lights for the kitchen, but also in the living space. And now I can decrease my shutter speed a little bit. So the exposure of that room and this room is quite different. And so shooting in RAW for this photo is important. I'm going to put on the ambient lights in the hallway to now that was a very little thing, but down this hallway to the left, you'll be able to see a little bit more with those ambient lights on. Okay, so let's take this shot. Now let's take our flash shot. And really with this one, I am trying to add a little bit of exposure to the kitchen. And I'm going to look at that photo right here. Boost that power. And just a little bit. There we go. That's a pretty good flash that will combine really well. Now I'm going to take one that's just a little bit underexposed for some of this area in the living space. And I'll see if I want to combine those photos because it's kinda hard to see this great chandelier. We have the fireplace as well. So I'm just going to take this photo with no flash. Alright? I think that's it for this angle. 18. The Kitchen - Part 5: I'm adding one more shot of just the brac business. We had that shot from before where we had the range plus the breakfast, Nick. But I really wanted to just highlight this breakfast neck itself. So let's take one with just natural, naturally lit, something like this. Now let's take one for if we want to go with the ambient route, our ambient lights on. Still getting used to, which is here. Now let's take one with our flash. And our window pulls. Tripod moved a little bit. So I'm going to go through those again. I think my legs were my tripod legs were a little bit too far apart. So let's go through that sequence again of the ambient lights at least. Alright, so let's take one, just know there are flashes lung. So let's take the flash one first. Then one with flash off. Now a window poll. Those wooden poles were a little bit dark, those first ones. So I think I'm going to really like that shot while I'm here. I'm actually just going to turn around and I'm gonna do one of those flat profile shots of our oven range, which is such a highlight, trying to get centered with that as much as possible. There we go. I think this one is just gonna be better with all natural light. That's gonna be a really nice photo to have. Even just get a little bit closer. Still want to be up a little bit so I can see the oven. But I also like seeing that that hood above it. Now I'm trying to make these lines as perfect as possible in frame. But I'll show you a quick trick in Lightroom to quickly make some of these lines straight in the post-production section 19. The Primary Bathroom: Here I am in the primary bathroom, and bathrooms are always pretty hard. You'll hear a little bit of extra echo as well. So I hope that doesn't bother you, but you can see me in the reflection that mine photography camera is way in the corner. And one of the benefits of the flip out screen from the z4 is that I can actually set it up, flip the camera around, and actually see exactly what is on the frame. I'm also using the app, which is going to allow me to remote trigger the camera. So looking at this setup, I got it as wide as possible. This is what the 12 millimeter. And this is a situation where even having a wider lens might be even better. But I think we're gonna get away with it here. Now my goal with this photo is to show really what this entire space is. We've got the toilet, we've got the bathtub, we've got the double vanity, and then of course we have the shower as well. Something that I'm going to look at to see is, do I want this close? It's kinda cool to see that closed as well, that that's a mirror, maybe halfway so that you can kinda see that It's a toilet as well, maybe something like that, giving that sense of okay, what is this space? We've got the toilet room, but we've also got this cool, cool mirror. I might just do two different ones. There is some nice natural light coming in from that room and that's some of the only natural light we are getting. So remember, we're shooting at f eight, we are shooting at ISO 160, which is the lowest for this camera. And then we're just using our shutter speed to basically expose properly. We're going to take first are shot with the lights on. We do have all the lights on, not a room that lends itself to an all-natural photo. So we're gonna do that. Then we're going to take our flash shots. And I might do one where I'm pointing it up just at the ceiling and then maybe one in this room as well. And see what that looks like. If I'm going to use all of those and combine it, and then that's going to be pretty much it. Then we're going to swap angles and see if we want to get a different angle. So here we are with like a one-fourth second shutter speed. So obviously having it on a tripod is important right now. So let's go ahead and take this one shot. So from here I can just press this button to take the shot. Makes sure I'm not in the mirror. That's pretty good. I'm gonna go in here and just do one with this door open all the way so that you can see the toilets. So people know that there is a toilet in there. Then one with it shut. Ouch. Careful. I actually really like that. That's pretty cool. I think that's a cooler shot. Now, looking at this, I might tilt down a little bit. I don't necessarily need to see the ceiling, the very top of the ceiling. And I want to see more of this tub. I don't want to get rid of that shower head though. But seeing that tab is pretty cool. Not sure if this ladder adds much or detracts. I'm just gonna put like that. It kinda adds a nice tone. I think that's about as good as we're going to get from this angle. I wanted to make sure we saw the vanity lights. We're seeing the double sinks, we see the shower heads, we see the bathtub with spout. And I think this is pretty much as good as we're going to get. So I'm going to retake this photo again just like this with the lights on. Now let me open that door. Turn on that light as well. Actually, that's kinda nice. Brightens up that area as well. Cool. So that's looking good. Now let's take one with our flash. With the flash, It's always a little bit of trial and error to see how powerful you want. Different flashes work different ways. This one, you can set it to full speed and then you can go down by increments. So if I want it to be half speed, I can go down and just go down until It's not as powerful. So what I'm gonna do is just from, from over here, I'm just going to shoot it at the ceiling and see what this looks like. The cool thing about using the remote is I can just switch to viewing my photos right from here. You can kind of see the before and after. It adds a little bit, although we have my reflection in the glass. So we're gonna do that again. Let me go over here on this side. So if you see me, I'm gonna be standing in this corner and while we're at it, I'm just going to take one from inside here Now I'm going to take one just, just so we can see which one works best from over here in the corner. Kinda, really close to the camera itself. Might be too, too close. So let me switch. Here we go. Cool. So we're going to have to combine a couple of those because we are getting the reflection in the glass itself. But I think that's pretty good. Now I do want to take one more with that door close just so we have that. The second shot with the flash, with that door closed. Alright, so that's looking pretty good. We're going to flop angles and get a different shot. Alright, so you can probably see me in this shot somewhat. So what I'm gonna do is take the camera and I know we talked about doing opposite corners, but I'm going to go to this corner here where we can see the tub and the shower itself, which I think is a good view to be able to see. So let's go ahead and we definitely see us in this reflection. So we're going to open this door for this one and turn on the light. Here. We're getting some really funky angles of those doors, the door frame. So I'm going to try to get that plant in there. So I'm just trying to set up this angle. It's pretty difficult to see what I'm doing over here. So what I'm trying to do is try to make sure these lines aren't totally out of whack. So I want to highlight the bathtub, the shower itself. I think something like this works pretty good. You kinda wanna get a little bit of the ceiling as well, but we're also highlighting this big wall of tile. So that's pretty cool. Alright, so let's go ahead and because I'm filming, I have my flash on. I'm just going to turn my flash off actually right here. Just turn this off and then take this photo here with the lights on. I'm going to make sure our shampoo can't be seen. That's pretty good. And then I'll take one with the flash on. Cool. Not sure if the flash adds much to that photo. Let's change it up again and we're gonna take it from the opposite corner, probably where the shower is, so that we can show the connection between these vanities and then the primary bedroom as well. Alright, so now we're getting the, so you can kinda see, I'm trying to make these lines vertical, but we're still able to see the vanity, the double van de, but now we can also see out into the other room. So we're going to have to clean up that really quickly. We are getting a lot of those cool light from the daylight coming in from there. That's the problem with mixing tones. What we're going to do is turn on those ceiling lights over there. I'm going to grab my flash, turn this off, get our first shot. Let me see him crouched down under here. You don't see me. Take one shot. And then we're gonna do one with the flash on. And I'm going to stand over here as much as possible. I'm going to have to move this camera. That's good. Then I'm gonna go ahead and do a flash shot for out here. So I'm just going to stand on this side of the door frame and point up at the ceiling. I was a little bit hot, so let's do that again. You see me in the reflection, how we're going to balance that against the wall behind me. All right. So that's it for the primary bathroom. And I'm going to move on to the bedroom itself where I think the lighting has improved 20. The Primary Bedroom: Here I am in the bedroom and I have one shot all already pretty much set up. It's from this corner of the room, which I think is the best one, where you can see the nice window and sliding door. So I'm just gonna go over here and kind of clean up these curtains a little bit. This is definitely a spot where seeing the outside is nice. So we are going to be doing our window poll for this shot. Alright, so we're all cleaned up now to take our shots, you'll notice that I am at pretty much right at waist level, a tiny bit higher, so we can see a little bit from above the bed. Not sure if I like this blanket here. Just add that, right? Yeah. I think that's cleaner. Alright, so ready to take this shot first with the ambient lights on? Let's turn on these. Even though we don't see them, it's going to add a little bit to the shot, especially when we change directions. And let's take one shot. Our flash was on. Let me take that one more time without the flash. Now let's take it with our flash. Sworn. Check that out really quick. This is the before. We're getting a little bit of a nice highlight on that furniture itself. Let me boost the power just a little bit. Alright, so let's add this more powerful flash. Remember, we're not really worried about what the ceiling looks like for these shots. Were more carrying what it does to the furniture and the interior of the rooms. Let's do one more. That looks pretty good now I'm just gonna go over here and take one just to have and I am going to be in the shot, but we're gonna be able to mask me out. Then same over here. It is a bit of a actually let me try one right here. I like how that looked for these photos over here. Alright, I might have been a little bit bright. Alright, so now we're gonna do our window pulls. So what this means is we're going to drop our exposure and we are going to expose to the exterior. And then we're also going to flash directly at our exterior around the window frame. So here we have this view. It's still a little bit overexposed on that right side. So we're gonna do this separately. One for the Laughter window, one for the right window. Boost at full power. There we go. We might actually, let's adjust our focus. Just trying to get that reflection is not so harsh. There we go, That's not bad. Now let's do one for the sliding window on the right. You'll also notice in the mirror that we'd get that reflection as well. So we'll see if we use that reflection in the mirror. Let's, There we go. Something like that's pretty good. Alright, so that's enough for this angle. We're going to rotate and flip from the opposite corner so we can see coming this way with the bathroom as well. So we, again get a sense of where we are in the room. So we're going to move over here. So we're going all the way in this corner. And on this side we're seeing that bathroom. We're seeing the closet, which is going to be nice to show. You've got the bed and we also have those lamps. Now you'll notice I'm looking at my phone because when I'm connected to my app, which I want to do so you can see what I'm seeing. I can't use my viewfinder or the LCD screen on the back of my camera. It's pretty good. We're getting a little bit of a funky line. I want to make sure those door frames are as level as possible with this lens, I am getting quite a bit of work around the edges. Some of that I'm going to be able to fix it in post for sure though. I'm wondering if I want to come out in front of that dresser. I kinda didn't like how that dresser was like poking into the bottom left of the frame as you see here. But I do like that plant. I might just come something like I get both lights. We're just get one I think I got one light with that plant in the background. I think that looks better. These are just the things that you got to think about and do kinda want to see that light at the top of the frame, the fan anyways. So that's looking pretty good. Okay, so let's take this shot ambient. And then also with our flash on through one flash over here. I'm just going to take one from over here. Actually from in here. Alright, so we have our flash shot, we have our ambient shot this side, we didn't need any window poles. And so I think we're good with this angle. Now I just want to see one thing really quick to see if an angle from this side is necessary. It's not necessary, but I think I will take this one as well just so we can see the door and I will open up that doorway, hallway door into the hall. And we have this nice window over there. We can see the whole bed and that, we can see the whole bed and that corner as well. Alright, so this is a pretty good full shot two of the bed. That's nice. I'm going to open up this door so we can see into the hallway. And I'm going to turn on those lights as well in the hallway. Alright, so let's take our first shot, which is just our natural light with our ambient lights, with our flash off. We're going to take one with our flash. Going to come over here and do another flash. Alright, now let's do our window pool. So I'm going to drop my exposure by increasing my shutter speed. So it has a nice exterior. And we have, That's pretty good. So let's just take one without the flash. Now, one with flash around our window. That's pretty good. Cool. So I think that's it for this room and we'll keep moving on. 21. The Laundry Room: Alright, so moving on to the laundry room. This is another kind of basic room. But for me it's pretty simple. I'm going to take one from this angle, from this corner of the room that you see in your frame and one sort of opposite. And there's a couple of things I'm trying to highlight in this photo. I'm trying to highlight the bench, which is awesome. The door to the exterior, the continuation of this room to the powder room, which you can tell from that wallpaper. So anyone looking through these photos would see that this connects to that bathroom. And then of course, the washer and dryer and any sort of cupboards and stores that we have in this room. So I think this angle is pretty good. We have these cool hooks on the wall. I'm going to move this backpack to this one. It was kinda taking up a lot of visual way on the right side of the frame. Yeah, I think that looks pretty cool. Shoes are not perfect, but kinda normal to have them a little bit string like that. This is a photo where I do not want to see what's outside. It's the driveway to the garage. There's a lot of stuff out there. And so what I'm going to do is completely overexposed that I'm not going to be doing any sort of window pulls for this photo. So right now if we want a naturally lit shot, what I would do is decrease our shutter speed. Now we are getting some interesting reflections going up on the wall to the left. It looks like coming from the window behind me. I'm just going to have to live with that. Maybe there's things I can do in post to blend that together. But that's okay. It's not a make or break shot or aspect to the shot here, looking pretty good for a natural shot, but I'm just going to go ahead and shoot this with our flamboyant style. So we are turning on the lights in the laundry room as well as in the bathroom behind. We're a little bit bright right now, so this looks pretty good. Just want to make sure we are as level as possible. Using this cupboard on the left as our guide post for what we want up and down. That looks pretty dang good. So we're going to go ahead and take the shot. Nice. Now let's do one with our flash. Full power, just from behind camera, a bit pointed up at the ceiling. And that looks pretty good. I might take one from over here as well. Now with this one I'm going to do actually setup my flash point into the ceiling and then get out of frame. You might be able to see my cat in the brain, but that's okay. Cool. I was a little bit too much getting on the wall over there. So that flashes just sitting in a cupboard up there, which now you can see open. We'll see if that does anything. Not bad, be able to use some of that for one of our photos. So that's from this angle, I'm going to swap sides and we're going to move this camera to the other side for the opposite angle. For this shot, I'm actually literally going to be opening this door and sticking one leg of this tripod out the frame to get as close to this wall as possible. Now we do have some dirty laundry in this washer, so I might take that out real quick. So those are the things you might have to do as a photographer and that's totally fine for the shot. Of course, you want to ask the homework. If it's okay for you to do that. This shot is looking pretty good. I don't like how this backpack is in the frame, like how it was. I'm going to take that down and that's looking pretty good. So I'm going to take this shot like so. We're gonna do our flash shot. Nice, that looks pretty good. I also think that this laundry room lends itself to a flat shot. This way, kinda looking at our our laundry machine and then also the cupboards. So let's see what that will look like. So we do have the cat and the shot. We've got this toilet in the shot. Which isn't a bad thing because it gives us more context to where we are as I like to do is move you out of the frame. And that's looking pretty good. I mean, typically I would probably move the cat out of the shot for sure, but this is looking pretty good. The washers don't seem to be the driver does seem to be perfectly level. Something like that looks pretty good. It might be a little bright. There we go. Something like That's looking better. Albeit a strain this out more in post. We had our flash gun. So let's turn that off. Let's turn our flesh on. A little hot. And then again, nice, That looks good. So that's pretty much it for the laundry room. Now with every room you're not going to be able to get every single corner, every single inch, unless you take just saw too many photos, but you don't want to take too many photos. You want to solid ones per typical room. And then for the kitchen, primary bedroom living spaces, you might need some additional ones. But I think that pretty much covered it. Well for the laundry room 22. The Living Room: Now we get to work with a super small space in this bathroom. It's actually not the smallest bathroom in the house, but bathrooms are tough. So you can see in the frame that I initially put the camera right outside the room were on my 12 millimeter giving me the widest option possible. And it's just tough, but I think we can work with this, the tile and here is super fun. There is this curtain here that you'll see here on the frame that I've opened up because I want to see the tile of the bathroom and the shower itself and adds a little bit. There is another light in here I'm going to turn on, but there's a fan on there, so you might hear some of that fan noise. I'm going to move these paper towels. She's going to get rid of this soap right now. Overall, this is actually looking pretty good. It's almost like, it's like the best you can do with such a tight space. I'm like literally getting right up next to the door. We see that door frame there, which isn't necessarily a problem, wondering if I should be up a little bit higher. Just for the bathroom shots. Clicking down at the countertop, the tub. Ideally, I'm not showing the door frame. I want to give the illusion that there's more space in here than there really is. Getting inside that door frame helps with that. So this is actually honestly pretty good. So let's go ahead and I'm going to open this up just a little bit. So people know that that is a bathtub in there. If they look closely, it's pretty good. Alright, so for this photo, we are going to take it with the ambient lights on. And let's go ahead and take this shot right here. We're still on a timer from previously, so that's okay. Now I'm going to take one with our flash on. That was so bright. Okay, so let's decrease that shutter quite a bit, or increase the shutter to decrease the exposure. Or we could have. And now I'm seeing paper towel and corner. So let's actually turn off our flash. Let's start from scratch. Looks pretty good. Kinda want to highlight those tiles just a little bit more. So I'm going to tilt down. So we see more of the tiles. Yeah, that's better. Okay, so let's take this shot. We're starting from scratch. Okay, now let's turn our flash on. It's way too bright, so we're just going to decrease our flash power. That's pretty good. That's going to brighten it up quite a bit. So that actually looks pretty good in here. Let's see if there's another angle I can get showing the bathtub. I might be literally putting my camera up here on the counter, but let's see, sometimes it's easy just to pop off the ER best to just pop off the camera, move it around and see what we're working with. That it'd be nice to get a shot of that bath tub. So this is kinda like the opposite angle. So I think we're going to try to go something around here. It's just trying to figure out how we're going to get that tripod. You can probably see me in here actually, and I am crouching underneath. That's not bad. So literally, you might be able to see my camera in the corner or a there, it's like literally against the toilet, against the wall, crouched in there. The other thing that I want to do though, is get a shot of the vanity. So here I'm going to take a photo from probably within the bathtub itself. It kinda like this shot right here where you see the vanity, see a bit of the tile. It's kinda nice to see those. It's kinda like the choice. Do I want the tile or the lights? Maybe a tiny bit of both. That's not bad, except you are in the way now my friend. So let's do this. One. Can take it from over here. Then I'll come inside for the flash. Nice. So that's how you can take a photo of a tight bathroom and I'll be doing another one as well. But I hope you enjoyed 23. A Small Space Bathroom: Alright, so now we are photographing the open area which the fireplace kinda connects nicely to the entryway. So that's why I have this photo framed up like this where we see the fireplace along with the entrance as well. So here we're going to take this shot. It also shows where the kitchens at, which is nice, again, showing those connections. So let's take this shot right here. We've got the ambient lights on. And let's get our flash on. And now let's do our window pole. This is definitely gonna be a photo where we want that window pole. Exterior shot right there, both sides. Out the front door and then also that window in the background. So let's go first, the front door. Nice. Now this one, I see my reflection. Cool. That works. While I'm at it over here, I'm gonna do a couple more flash shots, but we got to boost our exposure. So now this is going to be another photo where doing just a naturally lit photo, it would look nice, too. Cool. Alright, so let's go ahead and turn off all the ambient room lights. For a natural shot, exposure is pretty good. Maybe increase it just a little bit. Let's take that shot. Then let's do a window poll. I think mostly of that front window, the door. Nice, Cool. So that's a great shot of this area. So next we're going to just move on and see what other angles we need of this space. Alright, so I know I'm a little bit dark in this shot, but what I'm going to do now is just get this great room shot showing the windows in the back, the sliders, and just how big this room is, that's the goal of this shot. I want to show the height of the ceiling. I want to show the height of the fireplace. And then just again, showing the rest of that room that we haven't seen before. So looking at my shot now, I'm going to take a photo for you to see. I'm not recording on my phone. Now, I've composed this image. A couple reasons why I wanted to make it a kind of extremely wide. I kinda like the lines coming up the left side and then also the right side. You see a little bit of little lines from the beam on the ceiling and the kitchen. And I really like the fireplace being on that third line. So beyond that, right third, we've got the window's kinda going in the background on that left-hand side, we also see the beam at the top of the ceiling, which is super cool. I might come down on my tripod a little bit, I'm a little bit high. Now let me take this photo one more time. This is just with natural light. I don't like how this basket is. So much in the frame. A little bit less as fine. That's pretty good. So let's take this photo. I've just been kind of composing this photo. So let's just take this photo for reals with just the natural lights. Let's do one with natural light. And at the same time, I'm just gonna do it sort of like a naturally lit photo with a window poll. So I'm just, these windows are too big for me to do a window pole with the slider. So I'm just going to expose to the exterior. We'll see how we can mask that out. I'm going to get this window pull this way. Should help. Let's do one more, a little bit closer. We are at full power, but there's so much light coming in. It's hard to compete with that light. Cool. And while we're at it, let's turn on our ambient lights so we have that shot as well. Alright, So I went a little bit out of order on that one, but this is our last shot to combine for our flabby and shot. I've turned on all my light house lights and let's get this one. Here we go. There we go. Nice. That'll combine two really nice photo. So I'm going to move over to the opposite side of the room and get another shot of this great room. And probably from this corner over here. Alright, so I moved over to this corner of the great room, we'll call it. I've composed this shot so that we can still see the great fireplace. We can see the entrance to the house, but we can also see a couple of other areas that we will highlight and other photos which include the dining space, the little little kids area. You see a hint of the connection to the kitchen. Then you also see that this is another Sitting area over here. So let's go ahead and take this shot just like so. Then I will take a flash shot. Let's take one from over here. Trying to really highlight this city area right here in front of the fireplace. That's nice. And then we're going to get our our, our window poll. Let's increase our shutter speed. For that exterior front door. It's looking pretty good. Maybe a little bit hot. There we go. Cool. So that's another great shot for this area. I'm going to continue to move to the dining area to highlight that spot which we haven't done so yet, you can probably see in my shaky camera what this looks like now, this is gonna be another great shot to really help showcase the, the map of the room where we can now see where that sitting area is with the TV in relation to the dining area and the kitchen itself. So I kinda wanna get one shot where we're seeing a hint of the sliding doors. Although I don't think my lens is wide enough for that necessarily. That's a pretty cool shot though. I'll get one that's more highlighting the dining space there. You can really see my tree house project in the background. Do plan on taking this photo again at a future date when we get a new dining table, which will fill the space a little bit better. So here let's take this shot right here. We've got our ambient lights on. Let's do our flash shots. So here you see me in the camera looking at this photo. I think it's going to be another great one for just sort of a natural look. So let's turn off the lights and see what that looks like. I like it. I like it. It's pretty nice. Let's make it a little bit brighter. Let's take that photo. Then. I'm also noticing we have a window Pole perhaps in the kitchen windows. Let's go ahead and see what that looks like. That might look good. So let's go ahead and take that window poll. So I think that's it for this wide angle. Now I'm going to push in just a little bit. You can probably follow me on this camera. I get a little bit closer to the dining space, which is going to highlight the dining space a little bit more. And while still highlighting the kitchen and this great room, it's just not going to be as extreme of a wide yeah, something like that's nice. It's still see that beam on top. Still see our table, the kitchen. This is really starting to highlight the table. Alright, so I've lowered my camera a little bit because I kinda wanted to tilt up so we can see this chandelier, we see the fireplace, we see this great room right here, the dining space. So this is really for highlighting that dining space. Trying to get those lines straight in camera using my level. Let's close as possible. It's only take one photo like this so you can see what we're working with. That's pretty good. We're a little bit hot, but for a natural lit photo, that's probably pretty good. Now let's turn on our ambient lights so it can get. So let's take this one shot. We're going to add a quick little flabby and shot from this angle. Just a little bit of subtle highlighting of that fireplace, which is nice. Now let's get our window poll. It's pretty nice for this photo. Let's try it from here. We're going to have to turn on. Let's do a 10-second timer and see what are two-second timer and see what I can do. If you don't have a trigger and if you're too lazy to set up your remote trigger, you can do this. One way to do it. Let's see. But that is a lot of trial and error, but that actually will look pretty good. So that's the dining room, dining area spot, which is great. You also see the bar with the counter over there, which we didn't really highlight before. So next I'm going to move to a couple of the other bathrooms, which are going to be simple and see how we can get those 24. Introduction to Demo 2: Welcome to this series of videos that you'll see throughout the course. This is a real-world demonstration of a shoot that I'm doing in my own house, which we have cleaned out. And this is a house that we're getting ready. It could be for sale or to rent, and we have not staged it or anything. So you probably hear a bit of echo because there's literally nothing in this house except for the walls, the hard floors. We do have the appliances which will be good to show in some of these photos. With this series of lessons where we go through each of the bedrooms and the rooms and talk about how I would go about photographing and entire home for a real estate listing with this series of videos in this house, in particular, it's going to be a very basic setup without talking about staging or anything like that, because we just don't have anything. And this might be the case where you show up for a listing and they don't have anything. We'll talk about editing photos and adding 3D realistic photos in the future, both manually in Photoshop yourself, but also using different tools and businesses out there, websites that do this professionally. So for taking photos though, it's still going to be the basic premise of we're gonna get multiple shots per room. We're going to do a flamboyant settings. So that means we're going to be capturing photos with the artificial lights on in the house. We're going to be getting a flash photo. We're also going to be doing any window pulls to expose for the outside, ultimately to combine them. Now of course, as I've mentioned before, this is totally a preferential thing. If you have a client that likes just naturally lit photos, we might not even have to take photos with a flash or do that whole setup. It's a good idea to talk to your clients ahead of time, to ask them what types of photos they would prefer. And also depending on what's outside the window and what's going on and what the style of the home is. You might just want to go for a naturally lit setup in terms of equipment that I'm using, I have my Fujifilm X t4, which is a crop sensor camera. This is going to come into play when we're choosing lenses. The lens that I have right on right now is a 16 millimeter prime lens. And the reason I have this on is because I like how sharp it is. The 16 millimeter is a little bit tight in terms of angle of view. But for most of our wide photos, it looks pretty good. Now I do have a ten to 24 zoom lens which will come in handy when we are in tight spaces and we need to get that whole room. What I don't like about this lens and whether you're on full-frame or crop center, if you're at that super wide 1012 or 14 mm on a full frame camera, depending on the lens, you might get a lot of distortion. It's going to depend on how close you are to things. But I was doing some test shots here and when I'm really close to this refrigerator over here, it starts to get warped. And so I'm going to prefer and try to stick on the 16 millimeter. But It's really up to you and you'll see the difference when I pop on the ten to 24. Now on my left side, I have a flash. This is the most basic flash setup you could get. I think it's one of the cheapest options that has good reviews on Amazon. And I wanted to get it just to show you what you can do with a basic flash. This is the newer end W5 70. It does have a remote sink, so I have this on my camera which allows me to place this in different areas and not have it tied directly to my camera, which is going to help when we're doing those flash ambient shots and also window poles where we're going to be shooting this directly at a window. It's on just a basic light stand, but it does, I did buy this goat ox head, which is great for me to be able to quickly just tilt it up and down, spin it around, get it any direction you want. Now there's a lot you can go into with flash settings and things like that. But I'm just going to set it on mid-range power, see how we go, and then just change it and then adjust from there. So I think it's time to get going with some rooms. In this room. What I'm noticing, I was going to photograph this room first, but behind me, you might be able to see some light splotches coming in. And that's because the time of day, the sun is shining through a window in a way that I don't like these really bright patches. So I'm going to wait until later on to see if those patches are gone once the sun moves. So we're going to move to some other bedrooms, living space, the bathrooms, and get started there. So let's get going. 25. The Living Room: Alright, so here we are in the living spaces is the living room, family room. It's the entryway as well in this house. And right now it's just a big open room. And I've already actually swapped to the ten to 24 for this shot because I wasn't able to get the entire room with just that 16 millimeter. So you can see here, I'm not going to, for every lesson, show you what's going on in the camera. But I wanted to talk about the basic settings that I have going on right now to get us started. And then it's going to basically stay the same except for our shutter speed is going to adjust. We're on to F and F a aperture to get a fairly deep depth of field. Our ISO on this camera, the lowest it goes is 160. So we set those, we lock those down. You could either use aperture priority mode on my camera. I'm on a hybrid manual mode. It's the aperture. It's basically like aperture priority. The aperture is locked to F eight, the ISO is locked to 160, and then it adjusts the shutter speed based on where my exposure compensation is. So the exposure compensation has a dial right here, but I'm using the remote triggers so that I'm not touching the camera at all so that I can set it here. So you can see that on mine I have the exposure compensation setup pretty high. If it was just exposing to the exterior which it goes there, then it would be at zero, but I have it up at plus two stops of light. Right now. I'm going to do it all the way up to two and two-thirds so that we can expose to the interior of the room. I'm going to shoot this room a couple of ways. I want to show you what it would look like to do a session without the flash and then also with the ambient flamboyant style. So the first one I'm going to take is this one right here. So I'm just going to snap this photo. I am shooting in RAW. I'm just going to take another one just for kicks and giggles. I really actually don't want to adjust the focus. So I tapped on the screen to adjust the focus there. And when I do select a different part of the image, it does adjust the exposure. That's how my aperture priority and using the device to touch on somewhere in the photo works for this image. So I'm going to basically start from scratch because I don't know if the focus has changed all so I'm going to take a photo there. Now without adjusting the focus, I'm just going to go to the exposure compensation, take it down until we are exposed to the exterior. Now the exterior of the living room here is rather nice. It's there's some trees. You see the neighbour's lawn and yard, which is actually a fairly nice looking lawn. It would totally depend on what this looks like if I want to take this photo or not with the exterior. Also notice I do have the curtains drawn. They're not looking at 100% great. So I'm going to actually go ahead and change those up. So these are things, you know, when you're getting started, if you're rushing around, you might not think about, but you've got to pay attention to these kinds of things. You'll probably see on the screen moving. So I'm going to have them out. I do want as much natural light coming in as possible, but maybe closing them like that looks a little bit better. Now you might not have curtains in your room, so that's okay. So let's go ahead and we are going to expose the ground again and then use my exposure compensation. Looks pretty good. So I'm going to take this photo months. Now. I am going to adjust my exposure compensation down so that I'm exposing to the exterior. And that's pretty good. Now, I am going to do one where I adjust the focus to the exterior to take that one just as well to have. Now what I'm going to do is I am going to turn on the overhead lights on to take one just ambient light shot. So we're going to take this one as well. You can see that's a two second shutter. So it's quite long, so I don't want to be touching the tripod at all. And before I looked at set this up, suddenly I didn't talk about is tucked into the corner pretty much as much as possible. I am showing this little table here to give a little bit of a sense of what the boundaries of the room are. I do not see the wall that would be on the left side of the photo frame. I am getting a little bit of warping that we'll be able to be fixed in Lightroom. But you can see there is a little bit of bend in this photo. Alright, so now let's carefully to turn on our flash. I'm going to see what it looks like. I'm just going to take a test shot with these settings now this is in the frame, so I can't have that. I can review my photos on my phone as well. So we're getting a little bit of a difference. Now basically what I'm doing, if you could see is that i'm, I raise this up just a bit and I tilted it a little bit more. I'm just bouncing it off the ceiling. The ceilings are white, so that is perfectly good for our photo. Let's take one more. Alright, looking good. And now we're going to do a window poll where we point directly at the window and expose for the window. With this flash shining directly on that window, that we're going to turn our exposure compensation down. Now I know this is taking quite a bit of time to go through all these things, but that is what it takes to make sure we get a good shot. Now if I wasn't recording, it might be a little bit easier. This is taking some time, but that's okay. I'm pointing the flash directly at the window. See what this looks like. It's tilted a little bit down. There we go. Alright, so that's gonna give us a good photo to be able to expose to the outside. Now, the exposure on these could be a little bit off, but I am doing a raw photo, so we'll be able to use that to bring up or down exposure. Let's do one more at this one without the lights. There we go. Alright, so that is this first setup here in this corner. I'm going to go around and take the same photo from the other corners of the wall. And then I'm going to move to another room 26. The Kitchen: Alright, so here we are in bathroom number one, which is a very, very tight space. I am definitely sticking to the ten to 24 lens. I'm on 10 mm right now. And I still have the F eight, ISO 160. So in this room, we have a couple of little items that I've placed to just have a little bit of color contexts, which is nice because this will actually come out as like a real looking good bathroom photo. Compare it to an empty bedroom which will have to add some furniture later if necessary. I have hanging plant up here which you get a little bit corner of this frame, which is impressive to see that this lens right here, it's so wide that you see that. Now it wouldn't make sense to shoot this way where you have a better view of this bathroom vanity. Although I might do that just to have more of a detail shot of the bathroom itself. I have a shower curtain, colors match. It's just little things like this thing. I'm not sure if I want to leave that or not. I can kinda see what my photo looks like using this, which is kinda cool. I do. I want these closed. A little dark. I think seeing the bath tub itself is nice. Toilet seat down. We have the ambient lights on in this shot. I might attempt to do a naturally lit shot, but it's so dark in here, we only have one little window up there that that's gonna be very difficult. I have angled it to try to get some of these lines. You can see the lines. Let's see where are some lines in this frame? Right here, vertical, vertical, as much as possible. Knowing that I can make some minor tweaks in Photoshop, but not a ton. So I'm going to stick with this angle here. Snap a couple of shots. So let's go ahead and do one. Let's do a natural shot for this bathroom as well. So we're going to attempt to do one now. We don't have a window that we're going to need. A window pull from. Let's see. Oh, yeah, I'm using my remote so I can't use the exposure compensation here, so I can get a decent we expose shot. Now, I might just take this a little bit to the right. I need if I do this, maybe I'll put these over on this side so they're closer to the camera and look a little bit nicer. But I do not want them to work. So trying to get some balance there. I think I liked it the other way. Just playing around. You're here with me for the full experience. Now, I'm not an interior designer, and that would be one thing to get someone to actually come design your space for you. But it's not bad. I just don't really like how I see this handle over on the right-hand side. I have If you've probably noticed for this shot, I have raised my camera up a little bit. It was similar over there because the entry table was sort of in the way and I wanted to get above that. Might be as good as it gets. Trying to even that out just a little bit. It's also going to let a little bit more light in like that. So let's turn off our lights and go for that. My flashes dawn in the other room, so when off but I don't think it affected this photo. I'm gonna do one a little bit darker. Let's see. There's nothing, there's really nothing outside that I wouldn't really want to pull in. So this one is going to be, let's just take one a little bit brighter even. Alright, I realized that camera was really dark. So apologize for that, but now I have turned on the lights in here. I've adjusted the exposure compensation just a little bit. So let's try this. All right, and then I'm going to bring the flashing. I to be careful not to touch the tripod. And I am going to try to balance this off the ceiling inside there. So let's see what this looks like. Wow, that's pretty bright. So I'm going to drop the exposure compensation just a little bit, but it looked nice. So let's do one more little bit bright. I can tell that those and those countertops might get overblown. I can also decrease the power of my flash here. But either way, it looks pretty good. Let me do that just for one, just to see that was at full power. I'm about half power now. And let's take one more. And that might be a little bit better. Alright, so I am going to flip around trying to get a detail shot of the vanity itself. You'll probably see that photo later in post, and then we'll move on to a bedroom 27. The Primary Bedroom: Okay, so here we are in the main bedroom. It's the largest bedroom and we have some space to work with, and we also have a big sliding door and another window and a couple of windows on the opposite side of the wall to provide a lot of natural light. So again, in this setup, I'm going to do one naturally lit shot, and then we'll do an ambient shot and then a flash ambient shot. I'm not really going to do any window polls because these windows are frosted over. And so there's not really anything to see from outside. Now, I guess I have a question. To leave the doors open to the bathroom or to the closet or both? Looks like I think it looks a lot cleaner with it actually closed. Let's see this one. I think leaving this one opened makes sense because it gives a little bit of context to where we are in the room, in the house when people are going through the listings online and they're looking at the photo, trying to sort of see where they're at. It will be good to be able to see that that is the bathroom off of the main bedroom. Let's go ahead and I'm at an F8 as always, ISO 160. I'm back on the ten to 24. We are focused to the basically the wall in the background. I have tried to vertically align as many walls as possible, but you will see that this line right here, this wall is a little bit not perfect, but on the other side, these doors are pretty good. This wall might on the right side of my actually just get cut out or cropped out. Once we do some straightening and post anyways, I could bring it maybe I'll bring it back. Let me actually back up just a little bit. So we have more room. We can always crop in. The resolution of these photos is pretty high. And exposure wise, it looks pretty good. So we're going to take this photo. Let's take one more. So let's snapped this photo. Now let's turn on our ambient lights. Okay, so let's snap this photo. Then. Lastly, we're gonna do our flesh, so I'm just turning on our sink. This we're going to we've got a big room point at the ceiling. It on. We're still at medium power, so we're going to see what this looks like and then adjust. It's pretty good. Let's go full power. Pretty good. Alright, so those are these photos on this side. I am going to take a photo from one of the other corners, so we have it and then move into the other bathroom, which is going to be a little bit tricky because that room is not really designed for great photos. Alright, so I have moved to this other corner and I did want to film it because I think this is a great example of another window pull and something that I'm going to show you in editing how to remove objects. So all of the Internet modem and router is plugged in to that wall. And it would be easy to unplug it. But I want to show you how easy it will be to remove that in Photoshop. So it'll be a good example for that. For this photo, what I'm going to do is I'm going to test something out. So I have been using my remote, which is nice because then you can see what I'm doing. But what I'm gonna do is just turn on a two-second shutter or two second timer. And I'm just going to press my camera to see what it looks like. So here I'm just going to do a completely naturally lit shot. I am blowing out the outside windows. We also have some sort of dots in the ground, which is where the bed was, imprints in the carpet. And that'll be another thing we can quickly fix in post-production. So I'm going to take this photo barely touching it. Now I'm gonna do one where it is exposed to the outside. Now we're going to turn on the ambient lights. So I'm at and F A16, the ISO, about a one-fifteenth, one tenth, one eighth shutter speed. Now I'm gonna do my flash against the ceiling. Let's see what this looks like. But the shutter speed a little bit faster, one-twenty-fifth of a second. That looks pretty good. And now I'm gonna do one window poll. So I'm going to expose to the window outside. It's not the best looking outside now that I'm looking at it again, it is the deck out there. But it's it's hard to appreciate what it looks like from this angle. So let's try this. Review it and make sure that flashes surrounding the entire window. That's pretty good. And I'm gonna do one for this flash or this window over here as well. I did get the reflection in that one. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to move this flash, angle it from over here, hopefully not getting that reflection in that window. When it flashes something you have to be aware of. Yeah, much better. Alright, so same setup as always, we got the natural light. We got exposed to the exterior. We got the ambient light. We've got the flash to the ceiling, and then we've got the window polls. I'm taking all these photos because I don't know right now exactly which photos I'm going to like which ones I'm going to use are combined. Maybe at the end of the day, the client, which in this case is us as the people who are getting this house ready to show. Maybe we want it all naturally lit. Maybe what's naturally lit will look better with the, the furniture that we're adding in editing. So it's good to have the options. Alright, I'm gonna move on to the bathroom over here. 28. Bathroom 1: So here we are in the bathroom and it's a super awkward bathroom. And the reason is because it's not like wide open. There's this wall here which I wish was not here because if this was not here, I'd be able to see a bathtub behind here, as well as the toilet, as well as the shower, as well as the two sinks by putting myself in the corner. But because I can't, while we're stuck with having to choose what we want to show, I think this is the best that we're going to get. And the reason is because I want to show that there's double sinks. I want to show that there's a shower. I also want to show that there's a toilet in the bathroom. I'm also going into your shots showing the bathtub and maybe the shower from a different angle. But for sort of, I guess our hero bathroom shot, this is going to be it. Now. I'm just going to walk you around and show you what the alternative was. I've thought about doing something like this too, which is not bad because it's a little bit more straight lines. I'm definitely going to have some warping. I'm definitely going to have to do some editing in Lightroom to straighten out lines to reduce the warping because we are getting that in the shot. So this one's not terrible because you can see it's straighter. That you can see the shower, you can see the sinks. You just can't see over there and see how big the bathroom actually is. But this one is not a bad one. Now let me walk you this way. So here you can kinda see what the setup is. But that's like a super boring photo. Here's the toilet which you don't really need to show. Now if I set up anywhere over here, we're seeing ourselves in the mirror, which is something you could potentially try to fix. In Photoshop. It wouldn't be impossible, but not something I want to do. Now. I couldn't get in the bathtub and try to do something like this. But it doesn't really show our double sinks. For our main shot. I'm going to go around here and try to get as much of the bathroom as possible. That's why it's good to have these little flip out screens if you're not using a remote is you can actually see what you're working with. Now also notice that I've raised the camera above the sinks quite a bit so that I can see them clearly. I wanted to get some of those lights up there. There are a lot of lines that are kinda tilted but looking pretty good. So let's actually do our ambient light. The window is also a frosted behind me. I thought about doing one with it open, but the view out there is not really great. So we're just gonna do full natural right now. Lock that down and take this photo a little brighter. It's not terrible, but there's also not a lot of light coming from the right side of the frame over here because there's no windows, so it's a little dark. So I think the ambient or a flamboyant combo is going to work good for this photo. Let's take this one though. Now with lights. Okay. Now we're going to bring in our flash that's on already. Do not want to touch my camera. This time we might combine a couple of different photos with the flash, because one I'm going to flash in this area and then what I might take it to the other area and turn it on. Let's take this one. This needs to be on, probably going to have to decrease or increase the shutter speed or decrease the size. Let's decrease the shutter speed just a little bit. Meaning make it faster. A little bit bright still it's taped down the power. Alright, that's not bad. Now let me take this into the other side. Okay. I'm standing here. You could probably see me in the reflection. So the cool thing about the remote shutter is I could stand over there and actually just adjust all my settings but make sure I'm not in the reflection. You see it? See how that was, right? It was too bright on the ceiling and I'm going to turn this around again to break. I'm going to just make an adjustment but actually holding it up, you can't see me but I'm holding it up with my hand. That's not bad. I know you didn't see me in there, but I was basically just holding this up myself, positioning it, rotating it until that flash wasn't as awkwardly bright in one spot. So I think that's it for now for that shot, I am going to take a couple of other photos that you'll see as alternative angles. But really with the bathroom is just working with tight spaces, trying to show the features which for me in this is the double sinks, the standalone shower. Also, this means I'm just going to use separate photos to get the other features like the bathtub itself. Alright, hopefully you're enjoying these photos and these series of videos, and I will see you in another one. 29. Bathroom 2: Alright, so I'm in the kitchen now and the lighting is a little bit better, but there are still a couple of areas that are problematic just for creating a nice shot that doesn't have, as you can see here at this super bright spots of light. So the first thing in the kitchen then I'm going to do though, is raised my camera up. I've been shooting a lot of the bedrooms and stuff at that waist height. But for the kitchen, I really do want it to be a little bit higher so that we can get over-the-counter tops. Now the tripod I'm using is nice because it does have a little bubble level here that I can look. It is a video tripod, so it doesn't have a tilt ball head, which is really nice for making those fine tune quick adjustments for leveling. But I can do adjustments with each leg to get it leveled and it makes sure our lines are a little bit straighter. Now looking at this photo, Let's see, There's a couple of ways to approach this. And I think I'm gonna do it in multiple ways, but one is just the straight on shot of the kitchen right here where we have all of the elements of the kitchen. We've got the fridge, the stove, the sink. I'm actually going to switch over to the 16 millimeter lens for this shot. I know I liked that lens. I know I have enough room in this space for the 600s and I can backup just like the sharpness and not so much warping of this image. Let me see what this looks like. Alright, so I see that I still have the splotches of light on the floor which I might be able to get away with cropping out or pushing my camera in, tilting up. But I also have it on the sink over there. So this handy-dandy umbrella, which is actually for my camera flash, I'm gonna see if I can put it up and block that light coming in from outside. I'm not sure if this is doing anything yet, but I'm running it there. I might work. Oh, we are almost there. There's just a little bit. I see. So let's see In that could get fixed in post, but let's see if we can fix it right now. Alright, I think that's as good as we're going to get now. We are also having some clouds coming that also decreases the amount of natural light in this kitchen. So if you're going for a photo that's completely natural light, I'm not sure if that was the best move, but let's try to take this photo with the natural light. We're going to bump up. Exposure compensation still looks nice. We've got a lot of light coming in from all sides. So let's try this. Alex, Nice. Now we're gonna do one with the ambient lights on. And then one with a flash. Put this flash on this side, see what that looks like. Alex, really nice. Then I'm just going to do one more over on this side. Cool. Alright, so now I'm just going to quickly go around the room. I'm going to move the camera. Alright, so now I've moved into the corner and I'm going to try to get a shot where we're seeing that open area over in the side. And I know you don't see this yet on the camera, but because the kitchen opens into the living space, I want to show that connection in a photo. So something like this. I'm going to take just natural right now. And I actually really liked the natural look of these photos. I'm going to shoot it with the ambient lights on and also with the flamboyant Leighton. And this is one where I will do a window, Paul. Oh shoot, I kick that leg. We're all we're going to hope that Photoshop fixes that. Now, I think I should retake this one at least with the ambient lights on without the flash. Then went to flash. And then one with exposed to the exterior. One with the window poll with this pointed directly at that window. I'm going to take one with the flash lighting up this room. This is potentially one of our other hero images. And so I want to make sure I have the option to combine that part of the room. Overexpose just a little bit. Now looks pretty good. Like I said, this is sort of a hero shot where we're seeing the kitchen, the living space. This is also the dining space as well. I'm going to continue taking a couple of shots of the kitchen from a couple of angles. And then also one of the dining space, which is one where we will definitely need to add a table or something and post if we want to show it as a dining space itself. But hopefully seeing how I shot this kitchen helps you. I'm just going to change the angle so I get a shot more of just the stove, just the sync from that corner, maybe leaving out the fridge and maybe one of just the stove and the fridge, really highlighting the pantry as well. So getting those four shots of the kitchen is key 30. Front Exterior: Alright, so I'm walking up to the space for the first time to take photos. And it's actually a different day. I'm wearing something different. And the reason is because in the other videos I was being I was filming it and taking the photos earlier in the day and the backyard was just super bright and sunny with a lot of shadows that didn't look good. And so I decided I wanted to wait until later in the day to get these shots of the backyard where everything was in the shadows. So one of the features of the backyard, which I'm just going to do the features first and then I'll move on to a big backyard shot is this deck right here. So I'm actually going to move around the furniture just a little bit to make it look nice. But really I just want to capture this whole area. Maybe even have this tree and the plants in it as well. Alright, so I'm just going to take a couple of shots from different angles. Still on the F8, I saw 160 and now I'm just backing up just a little bit to get some of the planter in the foreground. Now this shot here looks pretty good with the tree in the foreground. We also have the decoration on the wall. And you really get a sense of where you are with the backdoor, the sliding door of the master as well. Nice. Alright. So with that shot, I'm just getting a raw shot. I'm not doing any sort of crazy lighting flash or anything. I'll do all my editing in post. So there's another feature over here. The sun is going down a little bit. So it might end up looking like some nice golden hour sort of backlit setup. Let's go over there. When I took this shot yesterday to test it out, I actually didn't even think about shooting it from this angle because the lighting was just atrocious. But having the shadows of the tree on the house itself creates a more dynamic image. And so I'm gonna get this shot from both this side looking this way, then also looking the opposite way. So I'm trying to capture all the features, the garden boxes, the table over there, the little parabola with the grapevine. And I think that came out pretty good. You also noticed that was probably shooting up above compared to down at regular height or down lower. Just made this look a little bit nicer. Now this angle over here is really nice with the lighting. I don't want to get any lens flares or anything artistic like that while I'm shooting these kind of real estate photos. So I am trying to get in the shadow of the tree that's blocking the sun. But from this angle looks really nice. So let's go here. I noticed that my shutter speed is one-sixth, tenth of a second, so I'm going to open up to an F 6.4, just so I'm not getting any shake in my shutter. Right here. I'm getting a little lens flare, so I'm just going to have to cut that out trying to straighten out my lines. And while shooting. I might just do on a little bit closer more of the back patio itself with the back area patio. This photo is nice because it shows the extension of the backyard, which we don't see in any of the other photos. So it's nice to have that as well. I'll take one kinda like that from over here. I don't think that one's going to work that well. But I think out of all of these, I liked the first one from that corner. And then maybe the close-up of the parabola itself. Now I'm going to backup and get a shot of the entire space as well as the garage. So now you have a sense of what the entire backyard looks like. I'm going to shoot from over here, try to get as much of it as possible. Again, trying to sort of set the scene for the customer, potential customer, and give them a sense of what the space is like. So if I stand here, we get part of the deck as well as the garage back there, which is nice to see. I'm actually going to even turn a little bit more. I'm going to have to move the camera because I want to see these trees over here on the left side of frame. So that's a little bit almost the view that you're going to see. I'm on a little bit of a wider lens. I am on the 16. Now the sun is proving to be a little bit difficult right now. So I'm crouching down just so that I'm not getting any lens flare. I might take this in just a couple of minutes when the sun goes down even more so I can stand up and get a better shot. I'm going to try one shot from over here. And that's the shot that shows the garage, as well as that back patio space, which will give a sense of how the space is connect. Potentially put that idea of what someone could do with that space, the garage being in another option for an entertaining space. So I think overall I got the features. I would probably take just a photo of the garage itself, but that's pretty self-explanatory just from one angle, the whole garage. I have a another shot that I'll try to pop up here that I took the graduates Well done. My office was set up with entertainment space, which will really sell the garage rather than an empty space as it is now that I'll show you. Other than that, hopefully these backyard shots look good to you. And I'll be showing you how to edit them later on in the course. But for now, Have a good day and we'll see you in another lesson. 31. Back Yard & Exteriors: Alright, so now I'm gonna get the front exterior shot. So one straight on, one from either side. So three shots basically, one backed up across the street and then there's no really features that I want to show here. But if you had a nice front porch or something like that, I would probably get a separate shot of just that. I will get one shot of just the entrance itself as well. With the sun going down. The lighting is looking pretty good. I'm going to start with that front shot right here. Just straight on. Looks nice. With every passing moment as the sun goes down, the lighting actually looks better and better and better. So I'm just going to back up and get the entrance, the whole entrance like this square root off. Alright. I'm gonna start on the left and I'm just getting the house. I don't really care about the driveway and the trash cans over on the left. And so I'm just getting to the right with a bit of the front yard. Now this shot in the center, there's this lemon tree right there. So that's how it's not even going to be really worthwhile. In this one, the trees are kind of in the way as well. You can probably barely see me, but it actually provides good cover for my camera over there. Something like that might work. I'm going to backup. Now this one. There is some trash piled up on the left. So in an ideal situation, all that trash to my left will be moved, but it's not too bad. Now let's get one from farther away. A little bit of the parkway is a tree in the foreground. That's nice. This one's a little artistic backup. Get one from across the street. Now that one across the street didn't look that good, you get the telephone wires and if I backup more, you see that telephone pole, which you see in this shot, which really doesn't sell. Well, I'm gonna get a little bit closer up to the house because those ones a little bit further away weren't as nice. I think. Seeing that tree over on the right side looks nice. This one isn't bad, but you can see the camera in it. So I definitely take that out in post. Move it. And I do see myself in the reflection just a little bit, so probably move just a little bit. It's pretty good. So that's pretty much it for exteriors. And hopefully this helps. And we'll see you in another video. Bye 32. Introduction & Basic Editing Process for Real Estate Photography: Welcome to this section on editing and post-processing your photos. We're going to make your photos look amazing. In this lesson, I just wanted to talk about the applications and the basic process that I do for editing. And then we're going to dive into the applications, actually doing it in the next ones. So the apps that I recommend are Lightroom and Photoshop, both made by Adobe. Adobe products. They work really well together. I'm just used to them, but they do cost money. They have a monthly or an annual subscription, which is not always fun. But if you're a professional, you're going to make your money back. Well, by using these products, Affinity Photo is an alternative if you want a onetime purchase product, so it's not a subscription, which is nice. Then there are free alternatives like the photos app that comes with a Mac or comes with Windows computer. Those are great for basic editing, but you're not going to be able to do a lot of the things we do in this class like combining photos, doing that flamboyant style of photography that is a little bit more advanced. So you can get away with some basic editing using any sort of free app. But I would highly recommend checking out Lightroom and Photoshop. That's what I'll be using in this class. Really the question is, when it comes to editing and how to edit photos is what's the style you're going for? I think for a lot of real estate photography, you're just going for that bright area and clean look. And if you're going for a different style than that's up to you to kinda come up with how you edit it. But I would stay away from being too stylized with your real estate photos. Remember at the very beginning of the course I talked about our main purpose is to show the space, to show the details of the space, how it's laid out, what's included in a space. Don't go any further than that. You're not trying to create art with your photos. You're trying to ultimately at the end of the day sell a product so that product has to be seen easily. And so that bright, airy, clean look is what we're going to be doing in this class. My basic editing process is as follows. Start with cropping and rotating, which helps recompose the image. If there's something that I want to crop out of, it, helps straighten out those horizontal lines, those vertical lines as much as possible with a simple rotation, then you straighten your lines. So using the transform tool in light room, I'll go over this or any other tool. There's ways to actually tell the program, I want this line to be up and down. And this one too, and it will make sure it happens. You'll wanna do your white balance and color adjustments. So this is just making sure that, Oh my gosh, my cat wants to be in this class. We're just going to let u be in this class for a second. For white balance and color adjustments. This is just making sure the colors don't look off. Whites are true white. It's not looking green or pink or orange in your photo. You want to do your adjustment to your exposure, your shadows or highlights. So this is probably oftentimes bringing up the exposure of your shadows, maybe bringing down the highlights a little bit. So you have a much more even look, not super contrasty, not super dark or anything like that. And then another thing I'll add is a little bit of clarity or detail, which in Lightroom it's simply the Clarity slider. There's also a texture slider, but also looking at things like the Detail panel, which is the sharpness. And if you have any noise in your photos, which happens with darker rooms with longer exposures and also with higher ISOs which you're probably not shooting with. So just paying attention to those things. And then beyond those basic edits, we move towards our advanced settings, which is when we're blending together images will then be masking out windows or masking windows into your photo. Potentially even virtually staging our photos. This is something we haven't talked about. Adding furniture to a room. This takes a lot of work and effort if you're doing it manually using Photoshop. There's services out there that do this and online apps that can help you do this, which I would highly recommend checking out. This is definitely going to be that premium cost to your real estate photography. If you are providing it as a Service, then you can do things like sky or grass replacements for it, your exterior photos. So that's the basic editing process. Those are the tools I recommend. Now let's dive into actually editing and we're going to start with some brief overview of how to use Lightroom 33. Adobe Lightroom Introduction for Real Estate Photographers: Welcome to this section of the real estate photography course, all about editing our photos. In this section, we're going to cover the basics of editing in Lightroom. If you already know how to use Lightroom, the first couple of lessons might be a little bit repetitive. You might want to skip them. If you are brand new to Lightroom, I hope that this helps you out. I'll walk through importing, organizing, and all of the basic tools that you'll need to know to start editing your photos in Lightroom. This is not an in-depth a to Z beginner to advanced course on Lightroom. We have another class on Lightroom if you're interested that I recommend you take if you want to dive deeper and some of the things, while I'll try to go over each step as clearly as possible. You might benefit from a little bit of background knowing how to edit in Lightroom. But if you're coming from another editing app, this should be super-helpful to I am using Lightroom Classic. Lightroom Classic is different than the Lightroom CC version, which is their Cloud-based editor, which is an amazing program. But I like using Lightroom Classic when I'm editing a lot of photos at one time. And it also works really well going between Photoshop and Lightroom Classic. I'm using the 12.3 release, which has a lot of the latest new AI based tools like masking. Some of that will be using, but you can use pretty much any version of Lightroom Classic to do a lot of what we're doing. In this lesson, I just want to import our photos. The photos that I've given you as practice photos are in a zip file in one of the previous lessons. And when you open it up, you should see all of these files. These are DNG files which are full resolution raw files that have all the information of that photo. So you'll be able to edit them just like IN for you. I've rename them to keep them organized. Bedroom 1234. So that's four pictures of one bedroom. And you'll see me combining these images in future lessons. I will be jumping over to the original photos. Sometimes when I want to show you some edits that are not in these set of photos. So I haven't given you every single photo that I've given. I've given you sort of a select few. I didn't want to overwhelm you. Unzip that file. Then here in Lightroom, let me just give you a quick tour. So at the top, you have these tabs that basically take you to different rooms for different purposes. We're going to be staying in the library and developed tool. Developed tool is where you actually edit your photos library is where you organize them. On the left side of the library you have your organization navigator and down at the bottom you have an Import button. You might see this toolbar down here as well. This is our little photo tray where photos will pop up once we import them. To import photos, There's a lot of ways to do it just like every tool you can use keyboard shortcuts. But there's a simple Import button here in the bottom left. From there we're going to find the folder that you want to import. You can do that through the Navigator or you can actually simply go to your finder and you can click and select all your photos. Or if you're on a PC, you can use the documents and drag them into Lightroom. Or what I would've done has gone into this external hard drive under this folder where I have them stored on my computer. I want you to import all of these photos. But if you were taking photos yourself and you took a bunch of photos on a bunch of different shoots. You might want to adjust, import certain photos. And from there, when you open up a folder, you would just click on or off the photos that you want to import. There's also a handy uncheck and check All button down at the bottom. Over on the right-hand side, there are some things that you might want to do that are pretty cool for organization. And one is add to a collection. And so I'm going to do that. You can do this later, but I think it's beneficial to do now. So add to the collection is checked, then I'm going to click the plus button. And this is where you can create a collection or sort of like a folder for these photos. I'm going to just call this real estate photos. If you're doing a bunch of real estate jobs, you might want to name it as a specific job and then click Create. Now I'm going to click Import. I'm not gonna do anything else over here and just click Import. Now they will be imported into Lightroom. You'll see them up here in the main window and then also in the little photo tray down at the bottom, which is nice if you are viewing them one at a time with this button here, you can just go through and click on the photos down below. All of these windows can also be moved around to give you more space. And I'm zoomed in on my screen so it's easier for you to see in the playback. But if you're using a full resolution screen, you'll have a lot more space, real estate on your screen. You can always get back to these photos by going to the collections and clicking that folder. You can also go to catalog to see all the photos that you've created imported into Lightroom rather. And I started a new catalog for this course, which you can do by going up to File New Catalog. But typically, most people will just use one catalog and import all of their photos into Lightroom and organize them within collections, which is nice to do. Or you can find it under folders by going to, this is sort of like a view of your documents. You have your external hard drives and places that you've previously imported from. But I think it's easiest just to organize by collections. And within here you can also create a collection. If you need to, move them around, create a new folder, separate them. Sometimes I have folders for all the photos and then I have another folder for these selects. I'm going to talk more about organization in the next lesson coming up. I've already organized these photos. These are the selects that I wanted to give you to practice with. But I'll talk through my process of organization if you were starting from scratch. Alright, see you in the next lesson. 34. Organizing Photos for Efficient Editing in Lightroom: Alright, so now you should be in Lightroom and you should have all of your photos imported. The next step is to organize them so that if you walk away and come back, it's just easy to find the right photos that you should edit. As I mentioned, I've already organized these photos, so these are fairly organized. But if you had imported all of your photos, you would need to be able to quickly find the ones that are your selects, the ones that you want to work with and not. Lightroom has several ways to organize photos. One is in the library, in the folders, which we've talked about. The other is by giving your photos a rating, which you can see here, the star rating underneath the big window. You also have a flag which can be turned on or off, which is flagging or unflagging. Then there's these color labels that we can give them. My process is typically I go through my photos and I'll just go one at a time using my keyboard, right and left buttons. And the photos that I like, I'll give a rating for. And I can do that with a keyboard shortcut. Number four on your keyboard. 12345 gives you the different ratings. The ones I'm maybe iffy about, I'll put three and the ones that I know for sure I'm not going to use, I'll put as one or just leave without a rating. These are all my select, so these would actually all be fours or fives. Fives are the ones that I know for sure, for sure I'm going to work with. You can use the star ratings however you want. I would just go through here. Go 5555. This one maybe is a four, this one's a 3333444. And maybe it's I know that this photo itself is a really great photo. And that's going to be for sure one of the ones that I send the client back, but this one maybe not. So that's a three, for example. And I'm just doing this randomly because I want to show you now, we can use these filters up here in this tray to filter only my five-star photos. Anything with a four-star or above, three stars or above, or you can click this little button to be equal to three stars. So here's my three-star photos, here's my four-star photos. So this helps us to quickly filter our photos. And the ones that we like. The next thing I would do is I'm going to turn this off because I want to show all these photos, is give it a color label. And this just helps us visually see which photos should be grouped together, especially for real estate photography where we're doing multiple photos were redoing the ambient method or just any bracketing option where we're combining photos. So see how we have these four photos of this bedroom. Those all go together, right? So I'm going to select all four of these by clicking one and then shift clicking the next one, right-clicking and giving it a color label. So I'm going to just set red. It doesn't matter really to me what color I'm using. I'm just trying to visually organize these. So when I look at the photo tray, I know they go together. So for example, I would set this next set of three to yellow. This next shot of the kitchen set to green. Now you can see how easy it is to see which photos go together. The last way to rate a photo basically is to turn the flag on or off. I reserve this for later on and I'll show you that in just a second. But some people use this just to show the photos that they like, don't like. So basically select or non-selective. And similarly, you can filter by flagged down here. I'm going to open up my catalog that has all of the original files and edit to show you what that looks like. So I'm going to go up to File Open Recent. And my last catalog that I used is the one that contains all of those original files and a bunch of other projects and photos that I've worked on. So you'll see how I organize their ingest as Eigen. Alright, so this has opened up and on the left-hand side, I can scroll down and you can see all my collections. And I've actually created sub-collections or subfolders for some of these folders. And to do that, you would first create a collection set which is sort of like the master folder, the higher-up folder, and then your subfolders would be collections. And so I have a video school folder for all of my work related to video school. And then I have this real estate photography folder. This is where I put all of the photos from these two shoots, which you can see. If I go through and just click through, you can see all the photos from the class. And then you'll see that some of them have five-star rating down below, some don't have a rating somehow, one-star. You'll see some that have a color label as well. Now, if I just went through and I clicked the five-star filter, it pops up all of the photos that have five-star filter. These are all the ones that I know I want to work with and edit with. And I've added all of those five-star photos to a separate folder called real estate photography top, which makes it super quick to get to those top photos now. So here they are in this folder. Now let me turn off that five-star rating. Not that it really matters. But here you'll also see for this shoot of my current house how I've given a color label, too many of these photos that go together. So for example, this photo here, these all go together. These yellow ones, these all go together. You'll also notice perhaps that I have a flag. And the reason I use the flag is when I create a new photo using Photoshop, which is a step you'll see in this in this class. What happens is I'm combining multiple photos and then it creates a new version of that photo and re-import it into Lightroom. And that becomes this combo photo. And I set that as a flag, a flag it. So I know that this is the column combined photo. I know that's getting a little bit advanced and so you'll see that process later in the course and it'll make a lot more sense. But really what I want you to just know is that you have the four methods of organization. You have your folders over on the left-hand side and your collections. You have the star ratings, you have your color labels, and then you have your flags. So now you know a little bit more about organizing photos in Lightroom. We're going to continue in the next lesson to developing, and I'll show you the basics of editing photos in Lightroom. See you there. 35. Basic Editing Process in Lightroom for Real Estate Photographers: Welcome to this lesson. In this one, we're going to go over the basic Develop tab features, how to use these sliders and specifically more for real estate photography, which tools I will be using. You can see that I cleaned up the view, I close down some of these tabs, the toolbar down below. Also one thing is under View, loop info. You can turn on or off info with the command I on a Mac, Control I on a PC. And you can see the photo that I'm shooting, I'm editing right now, which is the nursery one. This is a good photo to play around with because it's a naturally lit photo, ambient light. But I am not going to end up doing any sort of combining flamboyant style with this photo just because I liked the natural aesthetic of this photo. Alright, so let's get over to the right-hand side. You'll see that there's a lot of dropdown panels or Windows and you could drop down each one to see which one, which what it does. The basic sliders are a lot of what you're going to be playing around with in light room. Each slider you can click and drag to the left and right to adjust, you can double-click to reset it back to the original setting. If you make a bunch of changes, you can reset all of your edits with this reset button on the bottom right, and that reads sets pretty much everything. You can also hover over the slider and press the up key or down key on your keyboard to make individual adjustments are little incremental adjustments. And you could also click in this number area and actually type in a number if you have a specific one that you want to edit. You can see up at the top, the first thing we have in the basic slider is or panel is some color adjustments profile, which is the basic color of your photo. If I click this down, I have camera matching profiles because I shot this with a Fujifilm camera. It has the Fujifilm color presets built in. And when you shoot with a raw photo, you actually have to apply them here in light room. So I typically add it or shoot real estate photos with the Pro via look. And you can see if I hover over this, it changes the colors just ever so slightly. You don't need to do that. I feel like the colors of the Adobe Standard Adobe color are pretty good. You could always make your adjustments for other color. Editing down below with other sliders. Below this, we have our white balance. This is a super important setting for real estate photography is to get your white, right? So generally, most cameras shoot pretty well and it's going to automatically use your camera settings, but you can adjust these here. You can choose the auto and this is going to try to automatically, within Lightroom, adjust the white balance. You can use these sliders to make it warmer or cooler and then change the tint to make it more green or magenta to see what you like. Or you can use the Eyedropper, click here and then find something that's supposed to be pure white or pure gray in your photo, like this little crib here. And it's going to adjust all of the colors accordingly. Down below we have our exposure sliders or tone sliders. You have your overall exposure. You have your contrast which makes your darks darker and your brights brighter, or the opposite makes it more of a flat look. And then you have your individual sliders for just the different portions of your image. So if you just want to adjust the highlights or the shadows, or just the whites which are the even brighter parts of your image than highlights, or the blacks which are just the darker. You can adjust those sliders. This is generally what I like to do with real estate photos. I bring up my shadows to make it a little brighter and area. I might even bring up my highlights depending on if I'm showing what's in the outside of the window are not same with the whites, as long as we're not overexposing anything that's we want to see in the image. And then I LL crush the blacks, meaning I'll drag the blacks down just to bring back some of that contrast that we lost when we brought up the shadow slider. With all of these panels, you can turn on or off the, the settings just to preview what it looked like with this I button, you just click it and hold it. So here's the before and after Kinda like the warmth that we had before with the camera's white balance. So I'm going to change the white balance to add shot actually. Then we have underneath, we have our presence. These are tools that add sharpness, add detail, and also your color settings, vibrance and saturation. I typically stay away from texture and D Hayes here in this panel, those are more for landscape photos, close-ups, that kind of thing. But I might bump up the clarity just a little bit. Just clarity adds a little bit of Christmas to crispness to the edges and the details of things in our photo. Sometimes I like to just go extreme with them to see what they look like. And then dial it back. Some people actually like softening images just a little bit for real estate as well. So going down with the clarity can be cool too, but that's more of a preferential style. Then with vibrance and saturation, saturation will bring up the color saturation for all the colors in the image. Vibrance does it in a more intelligent way. As you slide up the vibrance, it will bring up the saturation of colors that aren't as saturated already. Like in this image, it might bring up more of the blues and greens compared to the warm yellows, reds and oranges versus the saturation, which just brings everything up. So you can see if I crank the saturation all the way up, look how crazy the reds and yellows are versus my vibrance. When I do it, It's still too much if I drag it all the way up to 100, but it's not terrible. But I never would just drag that up all the way. But for real estate photography, it really depends on what style you're going for. Some people like that. D saturated. Not moody look but clean look. But in a room like this with the nursery, some nice photos on the wall and nice colors on the wall. I might just boost the saturation just a little bit. So that's the basic panel on. And that is a couple of things that I might do for this particular photo. I'm not going to go over every single panel because some of these do similar things. I might go through specific ones later on when I'm talking about a specific demonstration of a photo. But if you're interested in what all of these panels do in-depth, I definitely encourage you to check out my full Lightroom course, like the tone curve for example. This is just another way to adjust the exposure. You have this curve that goes from shadows on the bottom left to highlights on the top right. And then you could set points in the middle to increase or decrease the exposure. So say I want to bring up my highlights. I can do this by clicking up at the top and dragging the top of the slider up or the curve up. And then I could say, I want my shadows to be a little bit darker, so I'm going to bring those back down. And that's a typical what you'll hear in photography. S curve, which is, it kinda looks like an S, which adds contrast to our image. Maybe you don't like contrast and we want to go something like this. Nice, bright and airy look, which is pretty cool. Now I can turn on and off this panel by clicking this eyeball. Or I can press the backslash key on my keyboard to see all of my edits removed. So just clicking off this eyeball just removes this panel's adjustments. And that's cool to see what each one does. But just to see the before, after you can press the backslash key. You can also see that down below by clicking this before and after, it looks like a y, y, you can click through this to see the different views of the before and after look. The other main panels that I want to show you are the Detail panel. This is sharpening. So with raw images, lightroom will generally add sharpening already. Without any sharpening, raw images just appear a little bit soft. But you can increase the amount of sharpening by dragging up and down this slider here. You can zoom in to your image with the Z key on your keyboard or with this little exclamation point. And that might help you see a little bit more of what you're doing. Although with real estate photography, when we aren't really bumping up our ISO on our camera a lot. Generally, that's not a good idea. You'd rather be on a tripod, slow down your shutter speed. And the risk of getting a lot of noise in your image is rather low when you're using that method. With that low ISO. There's also a new de-noise feature. So this is an update with one of the latest releases of Lightroom that automatically reduces any noise which whether you increase sharpening or just with the photo itself with a higher ISO, it will have noise. If you are shooting raw and you have the raw image, not the DNG that I sent you. You can use that feature or you can manually reduce noise by dropping down the manual noise reduction And then increasing the luminance, which is a lot of noise, you might get the color noise. Both of these are different types of noise. Luminance is sort of black and white, desaturated speckles you'll get color noise is exactly that. It's like red, green, blue dots that you see in your image. But again, this is most likely if you're shooting dark situations at night or just with a higher ISO. But this isn't important panel to check out. Just making sure that you do have some sharpening if you are shooting raw lens corrections, this is another really important one. So when we're shooting with why super wide lenses, sometimes you get some warping around the edges. If your camera is one that has a profile that's already in Lightroom, you can go to profile, click Enable Profile Corrections. And it might already appear on here. But my Fujifilm camera lens does not have a preset, so I have to do it manually. But if you had, for example, the canon 16 millimeter, then or 14, 35 or any of these other lenses, it might already be on here. So check that out because you can see that when I turn this on and off, it does a little bit of removing vent vignetting and removing the warping around the edge. If it doesn't have your cost, your lens profile automatically in here. You can do it manually by going up here to manual and you can adjust the distortion. So for example, if your image is super wide and bending around the edges, you might want to go a little bit negative to bring the center of the image in. And that warp removes around the edges. I generally don't worry too much about this. Sometimes the vignetting can be bad if you are not using a good lens. And this is where I would remove the vignetting. So you take this vignetting slider and I drag up that even with this lens actually I can tell there's a little bit of vignetting, so I'm gonna go plus 25 there. You do not want to do that with the effects down here where there's a post crop vignetting. And what this does is it adds a white vignette or it as a black vignette. For real estate photography, you really want to stay from vignetting. But if you want to remove a vignette, that would be under manual vignetting or it might automatically do it with your specific lens profile. Speaking of Lens Corrections, another really important tool is the transform panel. This is one where I spend outside of the basic panel. This is probably the second most important panel in light room for real estate photography. This is where we can straighten outlines. So in this image we have several lines and one that's a little bit off-kilter is this bookshelf on the left and then this dresser on the right. There are options to try to automatically make lines vertical or does it looks at the photos, tries to pick the most important lines and it will automatically straighten out. So let me click through some of these to show you Otto. It's probably looking at this line right here, these lines in the middle. It's okay. Let's turn that off. Vertical. Does a decent job making the bookshelf, this dresser, these lines vertical. So those are ones I might try to do. But another way to do it is the manual way, which is by clicking this little button right here. Your mouse turns into a little highlight box. And the goal, the processes to set two points that should be vertical. So I can go to this dresser here and I can go and you can see how it's zoomed in on exact point to give you a little better chance of getting this perfectly straight. So I'm going to set it right here in this corner. And then drag and then go down to this point right here. And nothing's going to happen until I sat a different, a second point. So I'm going to set another point. So we're gonna go here in the corner wall. Now it knows that those two points should be vertical, right? So it's adjusted the image and it has made those lines vertical, right? So let's go to a different image and I'll show you a different use of this. Let's see this one. Okay, so I'm gonna go to this one. This is dining to. An important thing is if you're doing a flamboyant editing process, I would combine your images before using the transform tool because It's harder for Lightroom to get to use this transform tool even if you copy and paste it from one photo to the next. To get it perfectly for these three or these four photos that we're going to combine in Photoshop. The way it bends and warps, It's going to be difficult to match perfectly. So I would do this after I do all my flamboyant editing. You'll learn that in the future section on that. But just as an example, you can see that because of the warp of the lens, the angle, these cupboards are not perfectly straight. This door frame on the left is not perfectly straight as well. Let's just see if auto fixes it. Auto does a really good job. So sometimes Otto is all you need to do. Vertical does a very similar job to. But if you wanted to go the manual route, I can click on this point. Let's go to the top of this cupboard. Drag down again, see doing one line doesn't do anything. So I'm gonna go to this one. That does a pretty good job. This line on the wall of these tiles is another good one that we want up and down. And sometimes the more you add and you can only add up to for the third and fourth one might not make an adjustment. Let's see this door frame. So adding to this door frame didn't do anything. So you really have to pick and choose. I would say prioritize the first two lines as the ones you definitely want to be straight. So here's the original. Now instead, let's make this door frame straight. So now I've picked those two on the outer edges. And because those outer edges sort of straighten out the other lines in the middle of the image like these tiles now are already pretty straight, right? You can do manual adjustments. There are these transform sliders for tilting, rotating, warping. But generally I stick away from that. Now, if you did it and there's still some lines on the left or right that aren't exactly up or down or you just want to get rid of them. One thing that we didn't look at is cropping, which is another very important thing that I, we'll often do at the beginning of an edit, except when I'm combining photos. In the ambient method, I'll do cropping at the end. But cropping is this tool right here. Here you can click crop. You can choose your aspect ratio. So I'm on my original aspect ratio and it's locked to that. But I can choose a different one. I can choose a one-by-one if I want a square crop. But generally the standard two-by-three, which is my original aspect ratio, is perfect for real estate photography. To crop. You just take in a corner or the top and drag in to basically zoom in or crop into photo. So I might say, Let's get rid of that very far left edge. We don't need to see that. I want to see more of these knives on the right-hand side though. And there you go. You could also rotate by hovering over the corner and dragging to the left or right to rotate. You can also adjust that with this slider here or reset. So that's a great tool to be aware of as well. Again though this wood and then you just press Return to save that. But again, you would do this after combining photos. So for this photo, I would probably remove all these adjustments until I do all my edits in Photoshop, which we'll see in the future. But for our photo like this, where I'm just editing one photo, I might go in here. And because I can't really see that bookshelf, I might just crop it out. So it's not like this weird line on the left. Maybe I don't want to see as much of this dresser right here, and that looks pretty good. I do not like how this photo is sort of crooked. So maybe I would go in here to transform. Turn this off, and then choose this photo. Let's remove this dresser. And let's make this photo the line that I want to be radical. Now it looks pretty good. And then the dressers still pretty good. It's not so bad. Alright, so those are the basic editing develop tools that I will be using for a lot of my edits. There are other things healing, cloning, these specific gradient mask tools that I'll be showing you in the future of this class in specific cases. But for now, just play around with it, get used to adjusting things, making changes with the sliders. And then we'll see you in the next lesson as we talk more about specific cases for real estate photography. See you there. 36. Combining Bracketed Photos in Lightroom + a Comparison of RAW vs Bracketed Photo: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to work with bracketed photos, how to combine them in light room. So this is an example of that, the kitchen 12.3. And what's cool is with the info on, you can see the settings that my camera chose to shoot this bracketed photo at or photos. So this was the settings. For some reason. It says 1.0. I think that's because I was on my manual lens which didn't connect to my camera, so I had my F8 manually. But it does record the shutter speed, which is the longest, was one-third of a second. The shortest rather was one-third of the second, then 0.6 s, and then 1.2 s was the longest. And so you can see that in this long shutter, the shadows are a lot brighter. And that's great because we can see the details of the cupboard on the right and left. It gets blown out or overexposed in the background. But we have in this photo, these details versus in this one. This photo is a little bit dark in the shadows, but the background is exposed really well. So to combine these, we can select these three. You could select however many you have. And then right-click and then Photo Merge and you're going to choose HDR. Hdr is another name for bracketing photos. Hdr, high dynamic range. Here it automatically will adjust and blend the photos together. There are things that you can adjust if you want it to manually adjust the settings. You definitely want it to auto align in case the things, the photos are just a little bit off. You generally shouldn't have any ghosting. What this is is if you are taking a photo where there's like people moving in it and they move from one area to the next area of the frame, then this would get rid of that ghosting in your image. But because we're doing still-life, there shouldn't be anything moving. Then all we have to do is click Merge. And what's going to happen is a new photo is going to appear here. It's loading up in the top left you can see the progress. And here is the merged photo. This is one where I would click that flag button here. Or if I was in my library, I would flag it here. Now I can see that this is the one that is the one to add it versus thinking, Oh well, as this one or this one, I easily can see this is the merged photo. You can see that it's a great combination of, of the exposures. Now, is this necessarily better than just going into this photo and adjusting the slider is like we can bring up the shadows. We can bring down the highlights. I'm going to bring up the overall exposure quite a bit. Bring down my whites. You can get in here. And with some of the more advanced masking tools, we could probably get it to look pretty close to what the other bracket photo looks like. But without doing any other adjustments other than just the tone. We can compare these two photos with this comparison view. So this, we saw that before and after this one that looks like RA. This is where we can compare two photos. You want to drag and drop a photo from your film strip to compare as your reference. So I'm going to drag the HDR photo. And then now we can see on the right-hand side are my adjustments of the raw photo. And this gets pretty dang far. I would say that in this case, it might not be necessary. And if you are shooting in RAW, you might not need to do bracketing unless it's a crazy dark and bright contrasty situation. If you're shooting in JPEG, I would definitely recommend bracketing. But after seeing this example, it's clear that a raw photo can be edited pretty well and might not need bracketing. But if you are bracketing, this is the process. It's pretty simple and you can tell that it does a pretty dang, good job. And you would do this before you go in and start doing any of your other color sharpening, cropping, and all of those other adjustments that come next. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next lesson. 37. Natural Light Kitchen Edit: So this is my bracketed photo and I just want to show you the rest of the edits I would make to this particular photo. You can see that adjustments have already been made. These are the ones that were made when bracketing and you had those auto adjustments selected. So it looks pretty dang good. A couple of things I would do is I would go into my transform tool and I often do this first. This left side is just a little bit not vertical, so I'm going to select this part of the cupboard. And then over on the right-hand side, this part of the cupboard too, you just get that sort of bending from this lens. And now that straightens things out. I'll then go into my crop tool and just copying a little bit to the left or from the left to get rid of that handle. And on the right looks pretty good. I wanted this to be like a balanced image with the center. Really, actually, I might go in just a little bit more. I'm trying to decide if I want to get rid of those handles. Maybe I do just to have a more balanced photo with this runner in the middle of the frame, in the middle of the kitchen. And that looks a lot better. Now our fridge does come out. It's a little bit tilted, but that's just because the fridge stands a little bit back. That's totally fine. I would probably go in here to the tone curve or the basic sliders and drop my highlights and whites even more. This is where I would probably go in and use my masking tool and I'll show you that just in a second. But my detail looks pretty good. Sharpening looks pretty good. Maybe I'd go back to basic and add a little bit of clarity. Sometimes texture looks good when you're taking photos of things like cabinet or wood textures. And then lastly, the background is a little bit bright. So I might go in here with this mask tool. You're going to see me using this in a lot of different ways in the demos coming up. But basically the way this works is you select a mask and there's masks for all different things. For us, we're not going to be choosing subjects because that will select people in your image. Sometimes we will be looking at the sky for exterior photos. Generally we will be using objects brush or one of these linear or radial gradients. The radial gradient, gradient, if I click that and then I just click and drag in my frame, you can see that it's a circular mask that feathers out. And you can adjust all of these settings here with the feathering and everything. You can also turn on or off the overlay, which is that pink overlay to see what we're selecting. And we now have this masks window that pops up up here. Again, this gets so advanced and you can check out my full Lightroom course if you want to dive deep into this, I just want to show you the basic process for real estate photos. Because now what we're doing is we're going to make adjustments to whatever is in this pink selected mask. And so on the right-hand side, we have all of our adjustments that we can make to what's in here. So we have our exposure so I can take down my highlights just a little bit. You can take down my whites just a little bit. I could even go down into my, it has a curve option and I can just ever so slightly bring down my highlights and then maybe bring down my darks just a little bit too, just so that we don't lose that contrast. Maybe we want to bring up the saturation back there, but that might not necessarily be a good idea because it's going to bring up the saturation of the cabinets, which I don't want to do because then it won't match the color of the cabinets in the foreground. But with this mask on or off, which we can now go up to the mass panel and turn on or off. We can see that it just blends out that exposure just a little bit 38. Exporting Photos from Lightroom: There's lots more to learn about editing, but I want to show you how to export a photo to save it. For our sharing. You need to have your photo tray film strip down here open and select the photo or photos you want to export. You can click on it, you can Shift-click a series, or you can command or control on a PC, select specific photos. I'm going to take this photo that we played around with and the keyboard shortcut for it, for it is Command Shift E on a Mac, control Shift E on a PC, or going up to the File menu and going to export. Here we have this box which can look a little bit daunting, but just take it one step at a time. The first panel is the export location. Here you basically just under folder, click, Choose and find or create the folder on your documents that you want to save it to. Next, you have your naming. So this is, you can get super creative with it if you want. Starting at the top of the drop-down, you have your custom name. So this is if you want to just give this photo a specific name. So maybe kitchen. More realistically though, you would want to choose custom name, original file number, or custom name sequence. So for example, I might call this California House or what give this a name. And then all the photos that I export would be in sequence then so California's House, one, then two, then three, etc. Or another one that I often use is the original file number. Since this is a DNG with a custom file name, it doesn't include it. But this is often nice because it includes that file number. So if you ever have to go back and reference that photo, re-edit it, or we're working with a real estate agent or whoever whomever. And they say, Oh, can you re-edit that photo of the kitchen? You can quickly find it. You can give it all kinds of custom numbers, names as well. For example, if you want to just rename it to the file name with a sequence. So the existing file name that you, that's already on here. And then in this sequence, you can do that as well, or completely custom, but I generally choose custom name, original file number, or custom name sequence. Next, we can skip video. We're not doing video file settings. This is important. So jpeg is typically what you'll want to export out as 100. Quality, not limiting the file size unless for some reason, you're working on a platform where you can only upload files that are 1,000 kb or one, which is the same as 1 mb or two, or whatever it is. But generally you don't want to limit it so that it can be the full resolution, full quality. So that's the quality. Next is the size. Generally, I also don't want to adjust the size. But if for some reason on our website or whatever platform you're posting to, it's optimized to be specific to a certain aspect ratio or aspects size, then you might want to change these settings. So generally I leave it as the long edge, and then I put that pixel size, so 1,000 pixels, 2000 pixels, et cetera. And I leave it to the long edge so that if it's a vertical photo, which is generally not going to happen with real estate photos. Then it would set that as 2000 pixels and then adjust the shorter aspects side to whatever is necessary based off of your aspect ratio that you've chosen in your crop. Generally that so if I just set the long edge to 2000 pixels and it was this photo, the bottom and top would be 2000 pixels, and then the sides would be whatever pixel aspect ratio of two-by-three resolution. Also, this doesn't have to be a specific number if you don't have the re-size. But 150 is pretty high-quality for online viewing, so I would just leave it at 01:50. Output Sharpening. This is something you can play around with. If you choose to turn it on, you can choose screen and then standard. The other options are for printing. And this can look a little bit good, but I like to do my sharpening in the Detail panel while editing the photos. So I generally turn that off metadata. So this is if you have want to remove your personal or location info on the photo itself. So or you can include it. So you can include your copyright info. You can include all the metadata that's with the photo, which is like the camera settings used. If your camera does connect to locations, it would include that. It's up to you if you want to include that or not. I generally just keep it on there just so that I have that info on that photo file. Watermarking also generally don't do that for real estate photos, but if you want to add a watermark, you can turn that on and then click this drop-down and click Edit Watermark. And here's where you can create your watermark, your name, you can choose the positioning. You can upload a file if you have a logo or anything like that here. Turn that off, and then post-processing. All say Show in Finder so I can see where it is. And I'm just going to click Export. You'll see the export bar in the top left, and then it will open the file. So now I have this photo saved is 2000 pixels by 13033, 1333. And we can see that this is a nice high-quality export of this at it. So that's how you export in light room. I'll see you in another lesson, continuing with our photo editing. Cheers 39. Copy and Paste Settings from One Photo to Another in Lightroom: An important skill to know how to do is to copy and paste, edit to another photo, especially for real estate photography, whether it's the same room or even a different room, generally you want your photos from one house to look similar. So for example, if I was just doing natural edits and I wanted to copy the settings that I changed for this photo. All the edits I did, which we made a bunch of them earlier on. I would press the Command C on a Mac or Control Z on a PC. And it brings up the Copy Settings window. Here you can choose which ones you want to have on. Generally you want to have all of them on except for the transform and crop and also the healing. So you don't want your masking either. And as long as you use the same lens, you would include your lens corrections. You don't want to do these other ones like the transform because that's the one where we're straightening out lines and a different photo, a different room is going to look different. So you want to do that manually, same with the cropping, healing, etc. So all I would do now is press Copy. Then I would go to my next photo. So here is a similar photo, similar vibe, ambient lights on, but natural light photo. This one I would, I am going to actually use the flamboyant process in the future with these other photos. But just for example, I can now paste it command V, and it pastes all those settings onto this photo. And if we look at both of these together and let me do the reference photo again. So let's reference the other one. You can see now the colors are very similar, Similar vibe with just the overall look. Sometimes the only thing you have to do is adjust the overall exposure, individual exposure just a little bit, just in case certain parts of this photo are a little bit bright. I might just, if I was really trying to match this photo, increase the highlights and whites so that that window is sort of blown out similar to this other photo. And that looks pretty dang good. You can also, once you copied, you can right-click and choose Develop Settings and then paste or here you can get to your copies settings as well. And the other thing you can do here is you can select multiple photos and paste settings. So right-click develop and Paste Settings and it will paste from what you've copied. There's also this paste from previous. So if you didn't go through and copy the settings, but you were just going one at a time. If you go to the next photo and then choose to paste from previous, it will paste what you previously did in that previous photo. Alright, hopefully that makes sense, that tongue twister. And we will see you in another lesson. 40. Create & Use Presets in Lightroom: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to create a preset. So here's this photo that we edited previously. If we open up this panel on the left, this is where you find your presets. I have a bunch of presets that I've created and downloaded or purchase from other people. This is where you import those. So if you ever buy a preset online or download them, you can click the Plus button, import, and then you find that preset file on your computer. You can also create a preset here by clicking the plus button. Click Create. From here you can choose the settings that you've edited to include in this preset. So similar to how we learn how to copy and paste settings before this is helpful if you want to just quickly be able to edit your photos based off of a style that you've created. So I would select all of these maybe not Lens Corrections. All of these seem pretty good. Or maybe you just want to do a basic exposure adjustments. So maybe this is like you call this real estate exposure bump or whatever you wanna call it. And you would just select the specific ones. Click Create. And now under user, we have this exposure bump. So I can go to my next photo. Let's go to this one right here. And now if I click that, it edits it. Let me undo that just so you can see that if I hover over these, you can see the different options. But if I click it, now, as easy as a click, we made all those changes to this photo, which is pretty dang cool. Then if you ever need to share this with someone else, you can right-click it, Show in Finder, and it will open up the actual preset file that you can then share with other people you could share to another computer or whatever. So that's how to use presets. The other thing to know about too is this amount slider. So this is a new, relatively new update. Say you like a preset but it's just a little bit too strong. You can back it down. Or if it's not strong enough, you can actually increase all the settings that you're adding by increasing this amount. And you can see it actually adjusting these sliders on the right as well. Pretty cool, huh? Alright, so that's presets. And we'll see you in another lesson. 41. Sky Replacements in Photoshop: On the sky is completely over blown, overexposed because I was exposing to the house. I could have bracketed this photo and done one exposed to the sky. But even with this photo, if I dropped down the exposure, you get a little bit of information in the sky. I'm just doing this just to show us what's in the sky. But it's not that dynamic of a sky. This is on the edge of what you believe is morally right in terms of how you create photos. And it might depend on your real estate agent. And maybe on a job, the agent will tell you, can you replace that sky, make it look better? This is a common practice, so it's up to you to decide if you want to do this, but let me show you the process. Right-click your photo and choose edit in Photoshop because this is currently done in Photoshop perhaps in the future, you'll be able to do this in Lightroom as well. Once it opens up in Photoshop, go to Edit Sky Replacement. Here. It's going to open this window. And if you have the preview button checked on, you can see what's actually happening. At the top you have options for skies and Photoshop comes with a bunch of different options. You can also import photos of Skies, which I think makes most sense. If you're in a location, skies look different, clouds look different. So you might, as a real estate photographer, wanna go out there and try to capture beautiful skies in your location. See how this photo, it's not exactly perfect. The warmth of the sunset. You want to make sure you try to match it as much as possible. So you can go through here that one doesn't look realistic and there's gonna be settings that we can use to adjust this, this one. Not that great. This one might work, but the color isn't great. So if you find a photo that you like, then we can go in and play around with the Smiths. There's different things you can do to adjust the edge, fade the edge, so it does a pretty good job asking you out the edges Photoshop super powerful now, but you could adjust the edge and the fade to fix that up. So we want to definitely brighten this up quite a bit. So it looks like it matches the exposure of this photo will probably make it. You're going to make it a little bit more blue unless you wanna go warm. But I think blue is going to look good. Something like that looks pretty good. You can scale it up. See how if I do that, the clouds move closer, scale it down if you want. Okay. This is going to depend on the photo you upload. You can flip it, you can then make foreground adjustments. So this applies to the edge where this photo is being overlaid onto your photo. So here we can adjust it, kinda blends it in. So see, it's really hard for you to see, but with the foreground lighting, you turn that down or up, you can see that it kinda adjust the fade into the trees. All these things are meant to just fine tune the edge and you can play around with them. Color adjustment, add some of the color of the photo to your foreground, to this. This doesn't look too bad. The only thing I don't like about this photo is that in the original photo we have this sunset right here. So I might choose a different one for this photo, but once you're happy with your adjustments, you can choose to output it to a new layer or a duplicate layer. I'll just choose new layer and click Okay, and now we have this new sky replacement group that includes the photo and all the adjustments that we made to make this look better. The only thing I don't like about this photo is how the sun in the original photo is actually shining through the tree here. But with the sky replacement, there's no sun there. So there's different things I could do to remove that son. But I would do that before with something like the Healing Brush Tool or the clone tool. And I'll show you that right now, but now you know how to use the sky replacement. So that's pretty much it for Sky replacement. But if I want to remove that, an easy way to do it is with the Spot Healing Brush Tool. So take that tool, adjust the size of your brush up here. You can also press the Control option that would be the Command Alt on a PC and drag it left or right to make it bigger or smaller. Then I'm just going to paste paint over that. And it looks like it was choosing some leaves from over here. So I'm just going to do this a couple of times. You could also get a little bit more specific with the clone stamp tool. It works similarly, but now I can actually select a part of the image that I want to copy and paste to the new spot. So option to make a selection and then I go to the new part and select or click to paint it on. Basically, since this is a tree, it works pretty, pretty dang good is pretty easy. It's hard to tell. If you just look at this photo, looks perfect. Then I would go to Edit Sky Replacement, going to add the preview on. And it chooses the same photo as before. So we're just going to have to increase the brightness like we did before. Make it a little bit blue, a couple of little adjustments. And that looks a lot better, even brighter. Alright, so now we have this new sky replacement group turn on or off, and that looks much more natural. Now one thing I didn't mention though, is that I would edit this photo in Lightroom, that original photo to get it straight, get the line straight, the crop, right, the colors and everything. I would get that done first and light room with the original photo before bringing it into Photoshop to add a new sky. Because now I could go back to Lightroom and edit this and it will be fine, but I like doing that original editing first. When you're done with all this, you click Save Command S or Control S on a PC. And if I go back to Lightroom, it'll pop up as a new photo, similar as we've seen before. Whenever you save a new photo from Photoshop, it adds a new version in Lightroom. I can flag that as the one that I want to continue working with from here. Alright, thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in another lesson. 42. Step-by-Step Flambient Editing Process: Welcome to this section on flamboyant editing. So this is a very specific process for how to edit real estate photos. And as we've learned, you need a few things. First, you need photos with the ambient lights on. You need photos with the flash on highlighting different parts of the room. Sometimes this is one photo, sometimes this is multiple. And then you'll need a window pole if there is something in outside the window that you want to see. So I'm going to show you how to do this with the office photo. I've also included a document with step-by-step instructions for the flamboyant editing process. I've broken it down to every single step. Sometimes in some situations you won't do all of these. But I'll include this in the previous lessons resources. So you have it. I think for the first time going through this though, it'll make more sense if you watch the video and you want to look at the instructions at the same time, it'll be hard just to follow these instructions. So watch the tutorial and use these, maybe print them out. Helpful. So the first thing we're going to do is in Lightroom, apply basic color and exposure adjustments. And specifically for window pulls, you want to make those adjustments thinking about what's outside of the window. So in Lightroom, what we're going to do is do our basic adjustments. I'm just going to do this really quickly. But you would go through and do all of your adjustments to your photos for color and exposure. Not thinking about transforming or cropping or anything. Just for color and exposure. Maybe bring up my saturation just a little bit. And I'm going to copy this, copy. Remember Check None, and then just choose Basic and go over to this photo and do the same. Looks pretty good. We don't want to make these photos to dramatically different because we're blending them. And then go to the next one. I'm going to paste the same. But really what we're worried about is what's outside the window. And so what's outside the window, we might actually bring up our vibrance or saturation even more. Maybe make it a little bit more green. I don't know. Depends on what you want warm. I'm just looking at what's outside the window. Maybe the original is fine. You can make all your adjustments. If it's a big window with a better view than it might change. Now, the next step is send photos to Photoshop as layers. So to do this, I'm going to select these three photos. Right-click, edit in and open as layers in Photoshop. This is going to open up Photoshop. And it's going to open up these photos in your layers panel. I'm going to change my layout so it's this it should be the same as yours. I'm using Photoshop tool any 23, But go up to Window, Workspace Essentials. And this is what it should look like if it doesn't go to arrange or workspace rather and Reset Essentials, I'm going to open up my Layers panel and make it bigger, as big as possible. Alright, so now what I need to do is reorder layers in Photoshop from top to bottom. So the top is going to be a repair photo. So this is if you have any reflections issues with reflections, which I don't have in this photo, then we're going to have our window poll. I should make this optional. So now we have our window poll. So let's put our window pole at the very top. And I'm going to rename it by clicking into the Title, Double-clicking, I'm going to call this window pull. You don't need to do this, but I think for this following along, it'll make it easier. Then we have our ambient shot. So this is the one without the flash, so that's this one right here. Off is one. Then the last one at the bottom is our flash shot. And you can turn these on or off to view them with these little eyeballs. On the left of the name. There's so much in Photoshop, we're not going to cover it all. Again, I have a Photoshop course similar to the Lightroom that covers everything you need to know about Photoshop. I'm just showing you this process for flam me editing. So hopefully you can follow along and get comfortable with this process. The next step is to align the photos. So even if you're on a tripod, I think it's important to align the photos to make sure that they match. These ones. Turning them on or off, they look pretty darn similar. But if they don't, go up to select all three of them or all of your photos and go to Edit Auto align images. Choose Otto and just click okay. And if it did anything, it would make minor adjustments to move them around, rotate so that they are aligned. And you'll notice this if you were photographing something like in hand-held, for example, you will see them move around and get fixed. The next step, this is optional, and I'll cover this in a demo later on. If you have multiple flash photos, then you'll need to blend those photos together. We'll cover that in a future lesson. We're going to skip that and we're going to go to set ambient photo loop to Luminosity mode at 50 per cent. So I'm going to turn off the visibility of our window poll, select our ambient later layer, and then change to luminosity blend mode, which is this dropdown at the top of the layer panel. Luminosity is at the bottom. So what this does is it brings in some of the colors and the lighting of your ambient photo, but it blends it together with our flash photo. If we drop our opacity to 50, this is a good starting point. And I can turn this on or off. You can see that it fixes some of the flash areas with this option can see there's some harsh light on some of these objects on the bookshelf. And adding back some of that ambient lighting helps quite a bit. And then from here you can adjust the opacity up or down to get more or less of that ambient photo back in there. So for example, for this photo, I think like boosting up to 75 actually looks pretty good. So subtle adjustment, we're just sort of blending the ambient photo with that flash photo. So this is looking pretty good so far. The next step is to mask our window pole. So the first thing is to switch the layer to darkened mode. This technically doesn't have to be first, but I like to do this. And what this does is it removes the overexposure. So if I select the window pole layer, and again on our drop-down of blending modes switch to darken. You'll see that it automatically actually removes the bright parts of the image. And we can see the darker parts, which is what's in this window. But you can still see me holding this flash on the right-hand side is weird. Flash bubble around my window. So what we need to do is remove everything outside of what's in the window. So to do that, what we're going to do is first we can create a layer mask. So to do this, the first thing I'm going to do is option click and drag this down to this layer mask button, that's this button down here that looks like the rectangle with the.in the middle. And by holding the Option or Alt, if you're on a PC, it removes that image. And you can see that with this black box here, layer masks are ways to paint in and out a photo. Let me just show you something if I undid that and I just drag this down into the layer mask, it would be in white and we see this photo is still undo that. Drag it again, option drag. So it's a negative layer mask and it removes it. And then from here, what you typically do with editing layer masks is take your brush, which is B on your keyboard. You can make all the adjustments to the size of the brush up here, the hardness, the edge or control option, and drag left or right on your keyboard to make it bigger or smaller, up or down to make it harder or less hard. That would be Command Alt, I believe on a PC. And then here we can paint in, and here's where we choose our colors. We have black or you click this and you select a different color. But for Layer Mask, we're just painting in black or white. Since it's all black, we need to paint in white. So we can switch this by clicking this button here, this little arrow which selects the first color or the secondary color. Or you can press X on your keyboard to switch those. So I have white now. And if I start painting this end, you can see that it starts painting in areas of this photo. And then here in the layer mass in the panel, you see that that black starts to turn white where I've painted in. If I painted too much, press X to switch to the black brush. I can paint out remove that I'm adding. I'm removing from our layer mask that we created, right? So you could manually do this and paint in the window. But there's an easier way to do this. I'm just going to delete that layer mask by selecting it and pressing the backspace button on my keyboard. I'm going to start over. So I'm going to option, drag it into the Layer Mask button. So that was just a little bit of a detour of layer mask just to teach you how to do that. Then the next thing I need to do is with the polygonal lasso tool mask around the window. So back here, here is your polygonal lasso tool. This tool you just click, click Click and it sets boundary points. And you want to do this around your window. Now with the layer mask selected so you don't want to have the photo collected, you want to click or select if you want to have the layer mask selected. You also want to have your color set to black. So if this is not set to black, you want to press the X key to make it black. Or click in here and make sure it's set to black. We've already selected our layer mask, clicking here. Then we press Delete on the Delete key. And what happens is we're actually deleting the black. What's inside this mask. Now I can take my rectangular marquee tool and just click anywhere to get out of that selection. It was still had that little marquee around our window. And from here we can go in. We could take our brush tool, press B on the keyboard and make it smaller. We can brush in the edges, are the edges, depending on if we want to fix things, make it a little bit cleaner. But that does a really quick job at making this window poll. Add to this photo. And with the darkened mode, if it wasn't in darkened mode, the edge of this photo or this window frame, see how over-exposed it is. It looks funky. Even get this top right corner and let me zoom in so you can see it just doesn't look good. But with it being in dark mode, it removes all of the bright parts of the image, which is why we use the flash to overexpose the edge of this window frame. And really the benefit of doing it this way with the Polygonal Lasso tool to make that selection of the mask is say you had a window or a door with five or six windows in it with little edges. You wouldn't want to do that with a brush. It would take too long to create those individual masks. And by using the darken blend mode with this polygon or lasso tool. It does it all within a couple of quick steps. So this is looking pretty good. We can turn this on or off and you can see what happens with that window pole. The next thing you would do is if you do have any reflections in your window, you would repair that. We'll see that in a future demo. But with this photo, we're just going to skip that because we don't need to do that. Next in Photoshop, we're going to flatten and merge this photo. So what we're going to do if we're happy with how it looks, is select all three, Shift-click to select from bottom to top. Then we're going to right-click and choose Merge Layers. And the reason we wanna do this is because there's some stuff that we're going to do in Photoshop to fix the ceiling. That has to be done with that. With this being one layer. Now it saves it as window poll. We could rename this to merge or whatever. If we save this at this point, let me just save it. It's going to save a version of it back in Lightroom that we could check out. So now here in Lightroom we have this photo up here. I'm going to flag it so we know that this is the one we're working with, which is the combination of these three photos. Let me go back and Photoshop because this photo that's in Lightroom is still connected to this file that we're working with in Photoshop. So the next step of my flam me editing process is to fix the ceiling. Sometimes with the flash and the ambient lighting, you get some funky looking ceilings with different color casts. And so generally we want to desaturate the ceiling so that the ceilings are pure white, which is unless your ceiling is a different color, It's really what most ceilings look like. There's a couple of ways to do this. One is we can duplicate the layer and make edits to that layer just for parts of the ceiling. Or we can do a specific adjustment layer for saturation. And I'm going to show you that method, which I think is the typical method I use. In Photoshop. You click this little button right here, which is our different adjustment layers. And I'm going to choose Hue Saturation. Right now. It's making adjustments to the whole image. And the properties of this effect are up here. So up here in the properties panel, if I take the saturation down, see how it adjusts the whole saturation of the whole photo. So now we just need to select our ceiling. To do that. It's similar. We're going to use the Polygonal Lasso Tool. We're going to take that tool. We're going to click around the edge of the ceiling. You can go outside of the canvas here and that doesn't matter. And then you just have to finish that connection so that we're making this selection Now an important thing that we're gonna do here is modify it to have a little bit of a feathering to this selection so that the adjustment we're making isn't so sharp from saturated too desaturated. So we're going to go to Select, Modify, Feather in here. I think that ten pixels is fine. And we're also going to apply effects at the Canvas bounds. So we're going to click Okay. So now there's a little bit of feathering. You can't even see it. But what's going to happen with our adjustments going to do that? Alright, so then the next thing is to delete our selection from the layer mask. So back in here we have our selection with are here now we're actually going to change our color to white and then delete. What we have now is actually the opposite of what we need. We need our layer mask to include our ceiling and not the room. So let's go back. We're going to take our marquee tool, just click out. And now what we can do is with this layer mask selected, we can press Command I to invert it. So this is a little bit different than before with the window poll where I option click this and add a layer mask. Because it was a, an adjustment layer already that has a layer mask, we had to invert it. So now if we make an adjustment to our, our hue and saturation by clicking on the hue saturation effect, bringing up our properties. We can drop our saturation and you can see we can make our ceiling perfectly white or gray. We might even bring up the lightness just a little bit. But what I don't like is that we lose a little bit of that color from our light, which is natural to have some of that warmth from the light. Maybe push this a little bit too far. Something like this might be good. But what we can do is erase a little bit of this mask with a brush to get some of that color back. So we paint back anything with, with our brush so we can press B on our keyboard. Now what I like to do is drop our opacity to something like 25%. And what will happen now is if we have our eraser or really not an eraser, but our black brush, we can paint over this light and it does it in layers rather than in one full blast pressure. And we can kinda get the amount that we want in a little more subtle way. So now if I turn this on or off, you can see that it's just applying to our light. The ten pixels on this photo might have been a little bit much for the feathering of this mask. I feel like it drops a little bit below the edge of this line on the ceilings. So I might actually go in here and erase it just a little bit more with this brush. Just a subtle fade, which makes it look a little bit better. And then once we're done with all of these adjustments, we're going to save it again, take it back into light room. Those save, those changes will apply here to this photo as well. And then we'll continue to make all of our final adjustments here with our straightening of lines using the upright tool cropping and things like that. Any last adjustments in the rest of this class, I'm going to show you a bunch of demonstrations for all of these other photos that you have here, walking through the process. Because with each of these examples, there's some differentiations and how I would edit them or different things that I would do. For example, in this photo, there's going to be multiple window pulls that will need to work with. We'll also need to remove some items in this photo. In other ones, I'll show you a different process for editing our ceilings in light room rather than using the method taught in this lesson. In Photoshop, there's going to be examples here where I'm standing in the frame and we're doing multiple flash photos. And we need to blend these together before we do some of the different steps. So continue watching the different demos to learn some more advanced ways to do flamboyant editing. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in another tutorial. 43. Editing the Kitchen Dining Nook: Welcome to this next section of the course. In this one, I'm going to go through full demonstrations of editing. Several photos. Editing is where photos, real estate photography really pops. Of course, you have to get great photos in the beginning. But to take your photos from okay, to amazing, It's in the editing room. So I'm going to walk through my entire process for each of these photos. And you'll see the name of the photo in the lectures. So jump around to the ones you want. You can follow along with the photos that you have access to from the downloads. So in this one, I'm going to start with the dining Nuuk photo. So the first step is I have my four photos for this setup. I'm gonna do my basic edits and walk through this entire process. So I'm going to go ahead and increase my shadows a bit. White balance is pretty good right now. I might make a final adjustment later on. I'm going to bring my blacks down just a little bit, bring back some of that contrast. Clarity. I'm going to boost just a little bit as well as texture just to get the textures of the wood paneling, the tiles as well. Saturation, vibrance, I'm also going to boost just a tiny bit for saturation, vibrance. Maybe a little bit for saturation. That's looking pretty good. Details looking pretty good. I'm just going to boost this up just a little bit for sharpening. Set up to like 75 or so Lens Corrections. I'm going to leave as is for now, transform, I'm going to leave as is for now. And that's pretty much all of the basic edits that I want to do for this photo. I'm going to copy and paste these settings so that I do my basic, Also, my detail. Git. I'm going to copy this and I'm going to go to my next photo, paste it. So this is the photo with the flash pointed at the ceiling. You can see there and pay attention to where the stove is. You can see that it just highlights that stove quite a bit. Here. I am shining the flash and it's highlighting the background or the coffee bar, the dining notes. So that looks pretty good. I'm going to just paste those settings as well. Looks pretty good. It's a little bit bright, so I might bring my highlights just a little bit down for this one are my main, my whites down. Then lastly, this is our edit for our window poll. So we do get, I'm going to paste those settings which copies the clarity and stuff that helps. We do get some reflection in here That's just because of the windows that are to the left of frame which you can't really get rid of right here. Maybe you'd want to Photoshop all of this out so it's a clean IV looking background, but I'm okay with it being a little bit more realistic. For this one, I might play around with the dehaze. Dehaze can help get rid of some reflections and bring out the details of skies and things. But in particularly through windows, it can help. I'm going to boost the exposure just a little bit. Maybe for this one I am going to play around with the tint and the white balance just so that the leaves out there look nice and warm, beautiful. That's looking pretty good. So the rest of this photo looks like junk, right. But for what's outside of the window, it looks pretty good. All right, so our next step is to take these four photos, select them, shift clicking all of them right-clicking, and choosing to open as layers in Photoshop. Alright, so now we're in Photoshop and the first step is just to order our layers properly. So our window pulls going to be at the top. And for this one I'm going to rename this one last time just so you can follow along a little bit more easily. But in the future, I'm not going to be renaming these are ambient photo is going to be next. And then our flash photos are at the bottom. So I'm going to just call this ambient. And then flash one and flash two. So the first step, if we have multiple flash photos, is to blend these together. So what I need to do is probably take the one where I'm standing in the frame and I'm going to erase that part of the image so that it blends with now what's behind it. So to do that we can use a layer mask. So I'm going to take flash to drag it into our layer mask. You're gonna get super familiar with layer masks. Now, this is not a hide all layer mask where it turns black. If I hold the Option key down and would have done that I'm going to take my brush B on the keyboard shortcut. You got to learn those keyboard shortcuts Control Option, click up or left or right to increase the size. And I'm also going to take my opacity up. Now, really the area of this photo that I want to keep is the breakfast nook and the coffee bar on the left. So I'm just going to paint over me standing right there. And that looks pretty good. And I'm also just going to paint over that giant flash in the ceiling. So now if I turn this on or off, you can see what's happening. I'm also going to actually I got it paint over on the right-hand side too, because I want to make sure that we are seeing the stove oven area, that the secondary flash photo is really highlighting. So that's pretty good. So now we have these two photos that are going to be combined, and I'm going to select both of them, right-click and just merge layers. Now we have our three standard layers. The next step is to take our ambient photo, change the luminosity to 50% and then adjust from there. This is looking pretty good. Again, what this does is it kind of gets rid of those weird color casts that we see with the flash photography, the sort of blue light. It brings back some of that ambient lighting to blend it in together. So something around 67 looks pretty good for this photo. Next, we're going to fix our window poll. So I'm going to turn on my window poll. I'm going to turn the mode to darken. So you can see if I highlight that quickly. Now we can see the window coming through. But we see so much else in this photo that we want to get rid of. So remember how we remove this. We have to create a mask around our window. I use the Polygonal Lasso Tool. There's all kinds of tools, but this is the benefit of the polygon lasso tool, tool. And using this method is I can go around these windows, even just getting all of them with one go, something like this. Like so. So now we have all those windows selected. The next thing I need to do is create a layer mask by option clicking this and these order, the order of operations can be somewhat changed, but I'm going to option select this and create a layer mask. And that has removed everything that's a hide all layer mask. It removes everything. Everything is black. But now, as long as this is black here in our color selector, if I press Delete on the keyboard, it deletes the selection that I have with this mask out of the Layer Mask. Now if I take my Marquee tool and just click anywhere to get rid of that. Now we have this nicely blended photo window, Paul. There are some weird shadows going on. So what I could do is zoom in here. That's what the Z keyboard shortcut and then holding option to zoom in if you're on the negative key or the zoom out. Or going up here to the positive plus to zoom in. And I'm going to take my brush. So now I have a brush and it's really big. So B on the keyboard. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to paint out this little line right here. And just pressing the space on my keyboard to get my hand tool allows me to move around. And let's looks pretty good. There's a little bit on this lamp right here. Just a little bit. Press X on my keyboard to get back my white brush in, X to go to black, to brush out. And this looks pretty good. Now, a quick thing you could do to fix this reflection is something with the clone stamp tool. Where is my clone stamp tool right here. So here's the clone stamp tool. The way this works as we might've seen before, is I need to select part of the image that I'm basically going to copy to another area. So I have my brush set, press the Option or Alt key on your own if you're on a PC, click here. And now actually I gotta be on the photo itself, not on the layer mask. So now I'm going to paint in. And you'll put, if you play around with this, you'll see that look how close I am to the edge of the left side of the window frame. If I click and drag and paint, it's actually painting that left side of the window frame. So you got to make a selection and only paint so far As where the leaves are basically, you'll get the hang of this. And because this is sort of a background, I think it's going to look pretty good. I could do the same over here. A little bit harder because they don't have as many leaves here to sort of blend together. So I'm just Option clicking around, sort of blending it in. Now let's zoom out. You always want to zoom out to see how it looks. Now the right side of this window looks a little bit funky. Let me undo some of those. Something like that looks better or maybe we just leave that reflection on the right side. But the one on the left actually looks pretty good, especially zoomed out. You're not really going to notice that too much on the left. That reflection was a little bit jarring. Cool. So now we have our photo. We have some weird color casts going on in the ceiling. I want to see which yeah, there's some weird stuff going on in the ceiling. There's some blue light, the warmth of the lights up here. So we are going to fix this ceiling now. So remember how we do that. We have to flatten these layers by selecting all of them, merging layers or flatten image, either one will work and all of this becomes one image. Next I'm going to take my polygon, a lasso tool. Again. I'm going to select around our ceiling. This time. I can actually just add feathering here. So I can just feather here. This is a cool option that Photoshop now has. And what I'm actually going to do is create a layer mask or a layer adjustment for hue saturation. And it automatically applies that selection to this layer mask. And I'm going to drop my saturation all the way around like negative 75. I still like having a hint of color. And then remember what we did. We took our brush, we drop the opacity and we just brushed out X on my keyboard to get my black. And I just brushed out a little bit around our lights to make sure that we're not losing that, making it a little bit unnatural. Going to do a little bit around this vent to just because it has a little bit of a different color. And that's looking pretty good. We can turn this on and off and you can see that it helps get rid of that blue light up here in the top right. And also it's, it looks like it's a different exposure. But because we move everything to a desaturated look, it fixes that already. Cool. So now I'm going to save this and it's going to send it back into light room. So now we have this image in Lightroom. So I'm going to flag it to know that this is the one that I'm working with here. I'm going to make my final adjustments starting with my transform. I like to do transform before crop because sometimes this changes, the crop automatically fixes what I would do. I'm going to take this right side of this cabinet. And then also, let's see, always trying to figure out what the most important lines are. I'm going to take this one first to see this edge of the wall. That does a pretty good job. Oops, let's get rid of that. Let's just take this one as well. It's looking pretty good. All right, so that's looking pretty good. So now what I'm going to do is crop in just ever so slightly. So I'm going to take my crop tool and just crop into the left just a little bit because that edge wasn't so nice. I like seeing the full oven range as much as possible, so that's pretty good. Press Return on my keyboard to get out of crop. Now I'm noticing this little coffee stain or something on here. So I'm gonna take my Healing Brush tool and just paint over this. And it does a pretty good job blending that together. Okay, maybe even get rid of this reflection of the light band. Alright, so that's looking pretty good. Let's see just our overall white balance. Let's go back to our basic. I'm going to take my colored eye dropper. I'm going to pick the white on the wall over here where it was a little bit warmer because of these lights shining on the ceiling and maybe from exterior, that looks pretty good. I might So close. Yeah, I think just dropping the temperature and tint just a tiny bit helps. Another thing that I like doing with cabinets like this, you don't wanna go too far, but with the HSL panel, I can take my color picker for saturation and pick this specific color and make them pop just a little bit. You don't wanna go too much because one that could just look bad. And sometimes it's just bringing up the orange just a little bit. But just making it pop just a little bit. Maybe even the luminance might help. Nice, Cool. So this is looking really good. I think that's pretty much it. Sometimes I like to go into my tone curve and just see about adding just a little bit more contrast at the very end to the overall image, really make it pop. And I can see the before and after over these final edits here with the backslash key. Or I can see like the first photo. And then this edited can bind photo here. You can really see the differences. Nice. Last thing I'll show you is sometimes I like to brighten up my ceilings. So I'm gonna take my mask tool. I'm going to use a linear gradient. This is one where you select one side of the frame. So I'm going to just click and drag. And you can see that now I'm picking the top. I'm not just picking the ceiling though, so I'm going to go rotate it along this edge of the ceiling. Then you can click this little middle box and move it around. And then let's expand this box. And what I'm actually going to do is subtract some of this from the top of the vent hood and the cabinets. I can click, subtract. I could do a brush and just brush it out. Or I could subtract another linear gradient and kinda create one like this. You can really get in there and fine tune it if you're just trying to make a selection of the ceiling. But for this one I'm just going to do this and then just boost the exposure just a little bit. See how that just brightens up the whole room just a little bit. And we can turn that on or off with this mass. So off, on, off on. That nice, maybe even just bring up the shadows a bit. Nice. Really makes this photo pop Cool. So this is my breakfast nook photo. I hope you enjoyed watching my full process and we'll see you in another lesson. If you've edited these photos yourself, I would love to see them, post them to the class and in the discussion. And I would love to check it out. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in another lesson. 44. Editing the Primary Bedroom 1: Welcome to this next demo. In this one, I'm going to be editing the bedroom photo here that you have access to. So similar to the kitchen one it or the dining nuke, it has four photos, but I think it'll be beneficial to see this process one more time. I might go a little bit faster since you already are starting to know things. The first thing is first is to do my basic edits. Mostly just exposure, not with white balance necessarily, except for our window poll. Here. I'm just going to bring up my shadows. I'm going to bring down my blacks, bring up my whites just a little bit. Clarity boost just a tiny bit. Saturation. I'm not going to touch saturation. It's, it's pretty warm already. Account are bringing out the blues of this blanket. I can try to do that with my vibrance, but I might actually go down into HSL, take my color picker for saturation, and go into this blue. Do that. And sometimes I see you click and drag up to increase the saturation. I see that as bringing up blues and purples. So here I might just go in and bringing those two colors up, sort of eyeball it. How I like it. I know I said I'm not going to play with white balanced, but I'm just going to bring the yellows down here just a little bit. It was just a little bit too warm and my opinion detail looks pretty good. I'm just going to increase just a little bit. There's not a lot of noise, but I'm just going to reduce a little bit of noise. Balance that up to 20 or so. Looking pretty good. Okay, So this is a good starting point and you'll really see how this photo transforms because it's, it, it honestly doesn't look amazing right now. So I'm going to copy and paste these settings. Copy detail. I'm also going to take the HSL, and that's it. And then I'm gonna go to the next photos, paste these settings, paste these settings, and paste these settings. And then for this one, just pay attention to the what's outside of the window a little bit more. Make it a little bit more green, warm. It's hard to not pay attention to what's happening outside of the window frame. But remember this is just for what's being seen in the window frame. Cool. Okay, so that looks pretty good. I might even just do a little dehaze. Clarity, just a little bit vibrance and it's looking a little bit funky. Green. Me boost that tint just a little bit. Cool, So that's looking pretty good. Next step is to select all four. Right-click Edit in open as layers in Photoshop. Okay, so now they're in Photoshop and we're just going to reorder these. So our window poll goes up at the top. Are flash photos are at the bottom and we have to blend these two together. So this top one, it's highlighting this front side of the bed quite a bit. This back one, it's sort of like the backside of the bed and the room over here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put this one in the bottom. I think overall this one looks a little bit more natural. So the one where I'm flashing over here, I'm going to create a layer mask. And with my brush at opacity 100, I'm going to just brush all this ceiling out and then brush this left side of the image out too. Because really what I'm getting is this bottom right corner of the image from this photo. If you see, if I turn this on, an object can kinda see what that's doing. And there's quick ways to create automations or shortcuts to do a lot of these things. And these steps that I'm going to show you. And I'll cover that in a advanced Photoshop section coming up. But right now I'm just doing every step manually one at a time. So now I'm going to combine these two photos, right-click both of them, merge those layers. Now with the bedroom, I'm going to change this to Luminosity and 50 per cent. And you can see that that gets rid of those cool flash color casts, but blends it in a way that is pretty nice. This one I might do like a lower opacity, kinda like the way that the flash photos look. Then I'm going to take my window poll. So remember there's different steps. But basically what we need to do is we need to make a selection around this window like this. And I'm going on the inside of the curtains, so just the window itself. I'm going to option, drag this into my layer mask. Then I'm going to delete on my keyboard as long as this is set to black. And that will basically add back this selection Now I'm going to get out of that. And that looks pretty good. I might go in here with my brush. Just brushed the edges a little bit and sometimes just taking the opacity down just a little bit helps. And that was a little bit too much. Nice. Alright, so that's looking pretty good. Cool. So overall the photos looking pretty good in this one, I'm going to take this photo back into light room so I can save this now, I don't necessarily have to merge the layers. It will save what you're seeing here as a photo in Lightroom. The merging of layers is important if you want to go ahead and edit the ceiling. But since we're going to do that in Lightroom, we can go back to Lightroom and now we have this combined photo here. I'm going to flag it so I know this is the one that we're working with. Cool. So the first thing I wanna do is brighten up the ceiling and D saturate it. To do this, we're going to create a mask for the ceiling. There's different ways to do this in the Mask Tools option. The two that I would recommend are the linear gradient. Clicking this, you can see if I now go into my image and click up or down, I can basically select just one part of the image. So I can go in here, try to get this at the right angle of the ceiling. The more I bring out these bars on the top and bottom, It's sort of feathers it out. I can go into this middle one and line it up with the ceiling as much as possible. And then to, because this is selecting the whole top corner, I would take this mask and actually subtract another linear gradient, like so. But lining it up, It's really hard to get those edges perfect. And if you see now if I take my saturation or I push up my exposure and I'm just gonna do it extreme so you can see what's happening. Those lines aren't perfect. So a better option is the object. I found this to be pretty good for ceilings with the object tool, what I can now do is just draw on I'm clicking and drawing onto the ceiling. And Lightroom is going to see the edges of where the ceiling and the wall meets and do its best at just selecting the ceilings. So I'm gonna do that. I don't want to go over the edge. Now I'm done. I let go and it did a pretty good job. So only thing I don't like is over here. If I go over here, it selected part of the wall, which is actually a different color. So what I'm going to do is take my mask, subtract, and I'm going to use a brush. I'm going to turn my flow and density all the way up. That's kinda like the opacity. Then I'm also going to leave auto mask on, which helps with like selecting the edge of things. If you're brushing too close to an edge, it will protect you. And just there we go, Something like that should work better. I might need to fix that up afterwards, but let's get out of my brush. Press Z on the keyboard to zoom out. Now let's do our adjustments. So first I'm going to desaturate a little bit and then I'm going to increase the exposure just a little bit. That's looking pretty good. Now if I want to desaturate even more, then what I can do is I can similar to as in Photoshop, I can go in here and subtract using a brush at a lower density without Auto Mask on and a lower flow. I can brush out some of this selection over the lights to get a little bit of that warmth back in here. If I turn on my overlay, you can kinda see as as I brush on, it's doing it in layers. If I bring up the density quite a bit, you can see it start to come off faster. I'm going to undo that because I want the density pretty low, so it's kinda like just blending in as much as possible. Cool. That's a pretty quick edit. I would probably fine tune this a little bit more and take some time to make those edges perfect. I'm going to just bring up the shadows just a little bit. There's like a funky line going on over on the right-hand side, which I don't really like, but that's pretty good. Now what I'm going to do is just do my final edits kinda like I did for the kitchen photo with the tone curve, I'm just going to add a little bit of contrast. And then one of the most important ones which I almost forgot about is the Transform. Transform. I'm going to take my lines, got to make sure that this line for sure this is a big prominent one is straight. Probably this line here in the back of the room. This line of the window. Yeah, that's all looking pretty good. Then I'm going to come into my crop. I like seeing the hallway, but I don't need to see that door open. And that was my bad. I actually left some blankets on the floor Over there. Something like that centers the bed, feels really nice. So again, we can compare this. Let's do the reference to our first photo, left and right. It's looking pretty good. I might even boost the contrast just a little bit and make it a little bit brighter. Maybe even just the overall saturation just a little bit and make things pop. That's looking pretty dang good. So this is the bedroom at it. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and we will see you in another one. You don't want to miss them because you might learn something new in each one. See you there? 45. Editing the Primary Bedroom 2 + Removing Objects in a Photo: In this lesson, I'm going to edit this empty bedroom photo. This one's a little bit different because we have to Window poles. So that's the main difference. So I'm going to do my basic edits. This is a different house, so I might just copy and paste the edits from a previous photo if I had already edited them. But since this is a different house, I'm just going to do a quick little edit, boost the shadows, bring down the blacks. Highlights, leave basically the same. A little bit of clarity. Vibrance pop just a little bit. And that's pretty much it. I mean, it doesn't look great right now, but we'll make some changes to the final photo. Copy those detail HSL, I don't need that. And I'm just going to a quick tip is I can select all three of these develop and Paste Settings. And it's going to paste those adjustments to all of these photos. Now the big thing is this one is a little bit bright, so I'm going to actually take the overall exposure down just a little bit. This one, the outside looks pretty good. This one, maybe a little bit of D Hayes and bring up that exposure. Maybe for this one I might D Hayes as well and bring up the exposure. Cool. So now I'm going to take all four of these right-click and edit in open as layers in Photoshop. In this photo, we're going to learn a couple of cool things like removing this little WiFi setup in the background, removing the spots on the floor from the carpet. We got some weird fan shadows going on with those flash photos that shouldn't be there. Now what we're going to do is we're going to put both window pulls at the top. We're going to edit those separately. We've got our ambient photo next and then our flash photo at the bottom. First, I actually have to align these in this setup. I wasn't using my remote trigger. So I think that these might not be perfectly aligned. So I'm going to go to Edit align Otto. I can see here on the canvas from the edges. After they aligned, I can see the transparency grid behind it, so it definitely did move them around. So you don't want to skip that step if especially if you're not using a remote trigger. Alright, so the first step is for our ambient shot, what we're going to do, we're going to change the blend mode to Luminosity, set the opacity to 50%. Now let's work with our window poles. So starting with this one, which is, let me make sure this is the window Paul for the right side. I probably could have used this one for both, but I'll just show you how to do this for both. If you have two, I'm going to take this, set my lasso tool around my image or my window. I'm going to option drag it into the layer mask. This is got black on it, which is good. Press Delete on my keyboard. Looking pretty good. I might go in here and do a little bit of brushing. So B on the keyboard, make sure I have the white now, or actually I still black. And I'm just going to brush out a little bit. The edge, which seems like it's my opacity is down at 54%. Alright, so now what we're going to do, I'm going to move over to this side of the picture, turn on our other bedroom window, poll, take my lasso tool. Just go around our window. So same thing. Option, drag it into the layer mask. Delete on my keyboard, get out of that mask and this one looks pretty good. Take my brush, maybe brush out just a little bit of this curtain. And let's zoom out. And that's looking pretty dang, good. So in this photo I am going to do a little bit more work in Photoshop. So I'm going to just blend these now, are merged them. So select all layers. Merge layers or flattened image basically does the same thing for us. For the ceiling. Let's go ahead and do the ceiling. This is a funky ceiling and this one is probably a bit easier to do in Photoshop rather than light room with the Polygonal Lasso Tool. I'm just going to take this all the way around. Like so. Close it off. Now we have that selected. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to select and create a hue saturation adjustment. I'm going to decrease the saturation quite a bit. Then I'm going to take my B were rushed tool Pasty at 50% is good and I'm just going to erase around my light and also around these fan blades because these are Brown fan blades and it doesn't make sense. If half of them, half of a blade is gray. It looks pretty good. I can press X on the keyboard, touch it up. So now I'm kinda erasing around the ceiling where I brought back a little bit too much color. Alright. Let's look in pretty good. Okay, so just with that adjustment, it helps a lot. I might just brighten it up just a little bit. Good. Does lightness slider? It's not as fine tuned as the Exposure Slider is you have and in light room, I could do a separate adjustment layer and use a different tool like the levels or curves to more fine tune the ceiling. Honestly, it's pretty dang good. Next, I want to get rid of these little marks on the carpet, which is where the bed was and this is something you might run into. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to use the, let's just use the Healing Brush Tool for this one spot healing brush. So it looks like a band-aid and I'm just going to make it a little bit smaller. There's different modes and you could test them out. But I just like leaving it on content aware and seeing what it does first. It does a pretty good job for this proximity match also might work for this one because it's taking from something from the proximity of this photo. And since it's all that carpet texture, it does a pretty good job as well. So now the floor looks pretty good. But there's one glaring issue and that's all this junk over here in the corner. There's different ways to get rid of things in Photoshop. And as the AI tools get better and better, being able to remove or replace content in a photo is getting easier. Let me show you a few ways of removing objects in Photoshop. The first thing I'm going to do is duplicate this layer by just dragging it into the plus new layer button so that I have a layer that I'm working on that if I don't like what I'm doing, I can always delete it and start from scratch. The tools that you can use. Our There's many. There's a few here under the spot healing brush tool. The first one I would try is just the Remove tool. So selecting that I can now make the size of my brush bigger or smaller up here. Or as always, control option on a Mac to drag left or right too big, make bigger or smaller. Then I just literally can draw over this. This is a pretty complicated one because it has the wires. The background is not too complicated, so it might work. Once I have it all highlighted, I'm going to let go and it's going to process it. And that did a pretty dang, good job. The base boards a little bit funky from afar, you can't really tell. So we might want to change things up, but I'm just going to call this the Remove tool so we can see the differences. Next up, let's create another layer. I'm going to call this the spot healing brush. Here with this layer, Let's zoom in here again. And now we're going to take our spot healing brush. So this one, it kinda does a similar thing, but it's more of a healing tool where it takes sort of what's around it and it tries to replace it. This is more for like, I don't know, for Photoshop retouching like removing pimples and things like this. And it works pretty good for this area next to the wall. But as I get closer to the base board, it starts to be a little bit funky. And I've found that if I just do it all at one time, it won't do as good of a job. So see, if I do that, it just doesn't do it. So I'm just gonna do one at a time. Yeah, I see the white of the little router right there is really messing it up. So I can keep painting over this, but this is a tool you can use in conjunction with the other ones potentially. So that's spot healing brush. I like the removed tool better. Let me show you another one. So this is, I'm going to call this Content Aware Fill. This is a really cool one that sometimes works really well. This one we literally just make a selection and it's best to get it around the object as much as possible. So I'm just going to go around with the polygon or lasso tool like so. You could also use, let me just show you. So that's that selection You could also make a selection with the objects selection, I'm just going to draw a box over this whole setup here and it's pretty much all selected. And then from here I'm going to go to edit content aware fill. So let me zoom out here. So now what we need to do is tell Photoshop which part of this image do we want to use to fill in this area that we have selected? And we do that because we have by using our brush, which is the plus. And we could paint on, and we can say, Okay, we want this wall we want if I brush over here, we want the floor the floor board. We want you to use all of this information to make that adjustment. And on the right-hand side, it's okay. But obviously not, not good. You could change the color adaptation and things like the rotation adaptation and that might help. But it's clearly not doing an amazing job. I just wanted to show you this tool though, because sometimes it does a pretty good job. So now we have that and it's not, not perfect. So there's one more tool that I want to show you and that's the sort of the manual way to do it. And that is, let's get rid of this selection. Let's zoom in here. We're going to use the old Clone Stamp tool. So here we can choose our clone stamp. And similar to how we've used the clone stamp before, we make a selection by pressing the Option on a Mac key and then making that selection or Alt on a PC. And then we can kinda go over and blend it in. So let me make this a little bit smaller actually. So Option, click Option, this wall paint option, the wall paint in option the wall. And sometimes you might need to use a couple of these in tandem. And maybe for this image, it's more the wires on the ground that I'm worried about and I don't care so much about the modem sitting there. Then if some internet sleuths sees this photo, they're going to say that's the Photoshop because there's some wires that are appearing on a Nowhere. Maybe we do just get rid of this as well. But this one's definitely a little bit more time-intensive. But with this tool, we can get a straighter baseboard. So I could keep going, but you can see that this one is getting pretty good. So the colors are a little bit off. So not bad. So that one compared to the removed tool, the baseboard is cleaner. So maybe what I would do first is do the Remove tool and then do a clone stamp tool to fix the base boards. So here if I take the clone stamp, especially where the baseboard is a little bit wonky, like up and down. We can fix that. And that's pretty dang good. One that I would also check out is which works similarly is the Healing Brush tool, not the spot healing brush which automatically does it, but the healing brush, which works similar to the clone stamp tool, where you make a selection with the Alt key. And then you go to where you want it to blend in. And it does so in a more intelligent way. So I can take this, move it over here, blended in. So let me actually just go two. Last one, I promise, to this new layer. And I can take this selection right here and then go over here. And it does a pretty quick job at fixing that. That might be the winner actually. So that is the Spot Healing Brush Tool or that's just the Healing Brush tool, not the spot healing. So you can kinda see the differences. I would say the Healing Brush, the clone stamp work pretty good and then the Remove tool. But of course it's going to change depending on your situation. So now that we've done all of that, I'm going to use the healing brush. I think that actually looks the best. And then I'm going to actually just right-click and choose flatten image, and it disregards the hidden layers. I'm going to save this and bring it in to Light room. So now we have this image in Lightroom, flag it. Now one problem is the edges are a little off from the alignment. So the first thing I'm going to do is go down to the transform tools and straighten things out, strain this line is a good one to use. Then maybe the door frame. And that does a pretty good job at straightening everything else out. And I'm pretty happy with that. I might just boost the contrast just a little bit. Brian things up, make it pop just a little bit more. And with that little bit of pop and contrast, I think it looks pretty dang, good. Awesome. Well, this has been a long one, but I hope that you learned through this process how to remove objects in your photos, which is definitely something you'll need to do in your real estate photography. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in another lesson. 46. Editing an Exterior Photo with Sky Replacement: In this lesson, I'm going to edit this front exterior photo. I already did another lesson replacing the sky, but I want to show you this from scratch what I would do. So first things first, with my basic tools, this is one where I'm not combining layers or anything in Photoshop. It's just editing this specific photo. What I'm going to do is I'm going to boost the shadows, but I don't want to lose my contrast. So I'm going to bring back down those blacks. The, right now I'm editing for the house itself, which is very, very cool. It's a little bit too cool from the shade. So I'm going to warm it up just a little bit. But I also want to really make things pop. So I'm going to bring that vibrance back up. That really helps quite a bit. I could go down to the HSL panel, which I might do and bring up the saturation of just the house. Maybe some of these other colors like the red. I don't want to bring too much of the yellow up, although that looks pretty good. Playing around with HSL is really fun for exteriors. Now, I might want to do a specific edit of just the house in a second. But right now, I'm gonna go down to the transform tool and see about making these lines vertical. They're pretty close. And that's pretty good. This is also one where I might just use the auto or the vertical. Now actually I like the, the one that I did with this, but I do have to crop in. I don't like that gate on the left-hand side, so I'm going to crop in like this. Now it looks pretty good. So you see the whole front yard or most of the front yard and the entryway might just rotate just a little bit though, Brown, something like that. Cool. This is a case where I might crop burst and then redo these because one of those lines was I actually cropped out. So I don't really care about that anymore. So I'm going to redo it with this line. It's pretty good. All right. That's looking pretty good. Okay. So the front of the house is a little bit dark. So I'm going to take my mass selection tool, and this time I'm going to take my object and just see what happens if I paint in this front of the house and see if it does a decent job selecting it. Nice, not bad. I'm gonna go in here and I'm going to add another object and I'm going to paint this side of the house. That did not do what I wanted it to. I'm going to add Let's remove that. Let's try again. I'm just going to take my box marquee tool and select this. There. That worked pretty good. Alright, so now what I'm going to do is just boost the contrast and the exposure just a little bit brighten it up. So it doesn't look so much in the shadows. And I think adding a change in the sky for this photo will really help. So this is looking pretty good. I think I'm gonna go ahead and take this into Photoshop now to replace the sky. And this time I'll pick a photo that's a little bit different, that I think matches the sun's setting vibe of this situation a bit better. So here in Photoshop, I'm going to go up to Edit Sky Replacement. This time I'm going to use a different style. Let's find one that is a sunset, one that looks more natural. Now, I know the skies from this locations, so I think this one looks more natural. That looks kinda like the clouds that we get here. That looks pretty good. I might brighten it up just a little bit. Maybe make it a little bit cooler. I don't wanna go overboard. There is some spillage over on the edge. So let's just increase the fate of the edge maybe or decrease the shift or shift the edge up just a little bit. I think that helps. Cool. So that's looking pretty good. So turn this on and off. You can see this actually looks pretty dang, good. Nice. I like it, so I'm going to save it. I'm gonna go back into light room. And then here in light room, What's cool is I can actually do a sky selection if I want to make further changes to the sky. So those guy, you could do some of this in Photoshop, but I find it easier in light room. So now I have this guy selected and from here I can boost the contrast. Now this is sort of like an edit on top of an edit. So you've got to be a little bit careful about this. But I kinda wanted to just make that sky pop just a little bit. Sometimes even bringing up the Dehaze for sky can really make it pop. Nice. So that's looking pretty good. Then I might go down to our tone curve for one final just brightening and adding of contrast. Yeah, that's looking pretty dang, good. Cool. So we can see those final edits that I've done. And then what I can do as well. Let's do a comparison before and after. This one actually already has edits to it. So let's reset this photo. And here we see the before and the after on the right-hand side. That's pretty cool, huh? Alright, thank you so much for watching this lesson. If you have any questions about this, let me know. Otherwise, we'll see you in another one. 47. Editing a Kitchen Photo with a Natural Designer Style Look: Welcome to this tutorial. This is just a natural edit of this shot right here. I thought that this could be a great sort of just stylistic, fashion designers style at it. So I liked the straight flat profile of this photo, but the foreground is pretty dark. So what I'm going to do is just boost these shadows quite a bit. So we can really see these cabinets that are the highlight of this photo. I boosted that all the way up to 100. I'm actually going to go even more further with the overall exposure, but then tone that down the highlights and the whites. I am going to completely overexposed the window, but I'll do that with a mask later on. Bring back down the blacks just to bring that contrast back. Texture. I'm going to boost a lot because I really like the texture of this tile and the cabinets as well. Clarity do that as well. Vibrance. I'll bring up just a little bit. White balance is pretty spot on. I can go in here and see if I use the eyedropper to pick this front of the sink, which should be white. But when I do that, it starts to look a little too cool, but I can always turn that back. So I can just start there and then move back with my temperature slider, which can help quite a bit. That looks pretty dang good. Next, what I'm going to do is let's go into detail. Let's make sure our sharpening up That's looks good. Might do a tiny bit of noise reduction. Looking good. That's looking good. I might go in here now and I'm going to overexpose this window. So to do this, Let's try the object tool, and I'm going to take my marquee selection tool and just drag it over. Our window. Does a pretty good job at doing that. And then I might add with a brush in Auto Mask on the rest of this window that didn't get selected. That looks pretty good. Then I'm just going to bring my exposure up. Now. I don't like how it's getting those plants in the foreground, but we will fix that in just a second. So I don't mind having a little bit of detail. I don't want it to be white. That just looks weird. But I'm going to bring that exposure. I'm going to also scroll down and decrease the sharpness. Actually, no, I take that back. I'm going to leave it like so. But I am going to go up to our masks, subtract with a brush and subtract on our plants because I want to see our plants. You see our overlay. Let's take our density up quite a bit and flow up. And using the objects Select might be good for this to just subtract object Mask. Alright, so let's turn off overlay so we can see what we're working with. Now, if this looks good, I can always take my preset mask amount and I can increase or decrease which basically duplicate, duplicates what I've done or tones it back. I'm just going to boost that up just a little bit. So if I had made a bunch of changes here, then that's what would change. Okay, that's looking pretty good. Alright, so now let's go back. Let's go back to our basic settings. It's looking pretty dang good. Let's just use our transform tool to make sure everything's vertical and horizontal. That flattens it out just a bit. Let's just do Otto see, that's pretty dang good. I can go in here to my crop tool and if I start to rotate, I can see exactly where my lines are and they are spot on vertical. The sink is centered, looking pretty good. Yeah, it's like pretty fail. You did a good job taking this photo majors. It's squished into the left. That is looking pretty dang good. So let's see the before and after, before, after, before, after. Boom, that's looking great. My friends looking really, really good. Let's go into our lens correction. And what I might do is just a little vignetting fix just to make those edges a little bit brighter. And then also bring that midpoint in just a little bit. More like a little stylistic thing, but I kinda like how that looks. Nice. Pretty dang, good. So that is a nice natural light edit of this photo. I hope this gives you some ideas for what you can do for this type of photo. And we'll see you in another one. Cheers. 48. Quick Bathroom Edit: In this tutorial, I'm going to edit this bathroom photo. It's a pretty basic one is just two photos. There's no window pulls. The first thing I'm going to do is any basic exposure adjustments. So for this photo, I'm going to just bring up my shadows a bit. I'm also going to bring up the overall exposure just a little bit. Bathroom, I want to make nice bright white clean. That's basically what I'm going for. The white balance I'm okay with right now because I'm going to blend it with this flash shot. I'm honestly not really going to do anything else right now. I'm just going to select these two right-click Edit in open as layers in Photoshop. You'll want to watch the advanced lesson on using actions to speed up your workflow. Because I have great actions that I've set up to auto align layers with F5 instead of selecting them and going up to Edit Auto align layers. And I also have one for changing my ambient layer to Luminosity Mode opacity 50%. So check that lesson out. I don't want to walk through it in this lesson, but now we have this photo that looks pretty nice and clean. So let me turn off this ambient layer so you kinda what's going on? I like it on except the ceiling. I don't like that glare from the outside. So let me actually just let's see. So that's coming from this one. So I'm going to add this to a layer mask. Take my brush tool, turn it to black with X on my keyboard. And that looks pretty good. Alright, so now I'm going to save it. This is going to send it back to Lightroom. I've already edited this photo, you can see here, but I want to show you this from scratch. So it's added this new version. And really what I'm going to do it just go down to the transform tool. Take my upright tool and I'm going to take this line of the mirror looking for what's prominent line and then this one of the door right here, it's kinda this one's going to be hard. I'm not sure if this is going to work or not. Am I have to just crop it out? That works pretty good. Pretty good. I'm getting a little bit of blur from the edge of our lens and it's pretty distorted. So I was using that, I believe it was a super wide lens. So let me just try to bend it just a little bit to fix it. That's pretty good. Helps just a tiny bit. And I probably should have done that before I use the upright tool. But now I'm just going to crop in from the left just a little bit. Kinda wanna get rid of this handle. Let me see if I can do that with the Healing Brush tool. My selection, move it up and that's pretty dang, good. That does a really good job. That distraction is not there. There's still little bit there. See, I don't know if it almost didn't get that bit, so let me decrease the feathering. Yeah, that looks good, that looks good. Cool. So that is looking pretty dang good. Maybe just boost the contrast just a little bit, a little S curve. You know me, I like to do my S curves. Maybe is it too bright friends? What do you think might be hard for you to see on that screen? You're watching this on me, bring my whites down just a little bit. Make sure my white balance is on point. I'm going to select the wall which should be a pure white. It makes it feel a little green to me. So I'm going to remove that tint. You just cool it down just a little bit. Or what I like to do instead is just go in, go to the HSL panel and bring down my yellows and orange just a little bit. Alright, so that is this bathroom edit. And I would definitely keep these things in mind and removing some of the yellow from a bathroom that you want to be pure white clean. Another thing I might do is just add a quick little linear gradient. Exposure bump to the ceiling. Something like that might be good. And then I'm going to actually subtract a bit from the wall. So there we go. You can see what I'm doing. I don't wanna go to that extreme, but I think that just makes it pop just a little bit more. So that's a quick little bathroom edit. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and we'll see you in another one. 49. Darken TVs in Lightroom: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to darken a TV really, really quickly. Sometimes you just want it to be darker. You don't want the reflection here. You can see my shadow, me in there. So what I'm going to do is create a new mask. So if you're starting from scratch without any masks, you click the Mask button. I would just do object for this one. And I'm going to use the marquee box tool and drag around our TV. And it does a pretty good job selecting the TV. If it doesn't do a perfect job, you can erase things with a subtract brush or subtract linear gradient or subtract object. But really with this selected, I'm just going to drop my opacity or my exposure down opacity, That's crazy. Me, my shadow, even just a little bit. If it's like pure black, it looks a little awkward, but bada bing, bada, boom. Just like that. Turn it on or off. Much better, right? So that's just a little tip for editing your real estate photos. See you in another one. 50. Speed Up Your Flambient Workflow with Photoshop Actions: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to be a super powerful, efficient Photoshop editor. What if I told you that with the click of a button or a keyboard shortcut, I can do things like change my ambience layer automatically to Luminosity mode with opacity 50%. Or I could take my window poll, I can quickly set it my boundary around my window poll with any sort of masking tool. And then I could, using two keyboard shortcuts, darken it and turn it into a inverse layer mask and press the Delete key. So if three presses of a button, no mouse clicks, I have my window poll ready to go. That's all done with Photoshop actions. So let me undo all of this. So to set these up, you'll need to set up your project with everything ready to go, as if you were about to do the action yourself manually. Then you wanna go up to Window and actions. And here you can see a bunch of default actions that come pre-installed with Photoshop. You'll also see some that I've created like my ambient layer, edit, my darkened window, window pull inverse, those are the ones I just showed you. Aligning layers. So I can select all of these and press F5. And there are keyboard shortcuts that you can use or change for any option. But actions are better to use when you have multi-step things that you're doing like changing the blend mode and the opacity or even beyond. So let me show you how to do it, for example, with the luminosity mode ambient layer. So I'm going to set this back to reset it to create a new action. Click the Plus button here, I'm going to call this ambient layer. We can set a function key right now to be the keyboard shortcuts. I'm just going to set it to F6 for now. And then you want to record. Here, I'm going to record, so I'm going to select this layer, then change it just as I would to Luminosity mode and change my opacity to 50% and then press the Stop button in this action panel. So it's recorded each step so you can see that it's selected the layer, set the current layer to the illuminate nasty mode, and then also set the layer opacity. I don't actually want it to select this layer, have this Select Layer step in there. So I'm going to delete that because what I want it to do is just do it to whatever the current layer is that I have selected. So if I run this for this bottom layer, for example, I just press F6 on my keyboard. It changed the luminosity, blend mode to the luminosity and opacity. I'm going to undo that. Pretty cool, huh? So you could do this however much you want. So for example, if I did it for this layer, you're not going to be able to automate the selection of a mask or creating your mask. But once this is set, if you want to create it for the window poll, Let's create a window pole. One. What are our steps for window pole? Remember, we're recording, set the blend mode to darken. We're going to option drag this into our layer mask. And then we're going to press the Delete key on my keyboard. Now let's pause that. So now we have this whole window pull action for this layer. So let's go ahead and go into another project. This window, Paul, is a little bit difficult. You don't have these photos, but I just want to show you. So if I already have this selected, and then I go to my actions and I run my window poll, which I didn't set a keyboard shortcut for this time. I'm just going to press the play button. Boom, just like that, with one-click, it created the window poll for this photo. Now, this photo I had to do a little bit of editing because the exposure and everything was a bit off. But in terms of that whole window pull action, it did it with one action, with one click of a button. Pretty cool, right? So what I would do if you're really serious about editing Photoshop, editing real estate photos and flamboyant photos. Photos specifically is setup actions for aligning liters, for adjusting the ambient layer, for doing the window poll, and then even for sealing adjustments. So once you make your selection, do an action for dropping the saturation or even feathering the ceiling edge or whatever it is that you want to include in the action. Pretty cool stuff. Thank you so much for watching if you need help with actions. There's lots of great tutorials on YouTube. Dive deeper. But of course I'm here to help too if you have questions. So thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in another video. 51. Clean Up Smudges on Stainless Steel Appliances in Lightroom: Here's a quick way to clean up smudges and things from stainless steel, fingerprints, that kinda thing. So here we have this oven that has this actually has a couple of things in it. So this isn't exactly what you would use it, but I'll show you how well it works. So I'm going to use a mask and I'm going to use the object select with, Let's go ahead and use the marquee tool. I'm just going to hover over all of this. And it does a pretty good job selecting that just the silver part and selects the black in-between, but that's totally fine. And really what I would do is scroll down and do a decrease in clarity and a decrease in sharpness. And it kinda just blurt it out. You can also go up and decrease the contrast. And then you can go up to the amount slider and just kinda bump it up. And if that's too much, I might decrease the sharpness adjustment. But let me show you that on, off, on, off. Pretty crazy right? Now again, this is something that you might not want to do if you're selling the house with an oven. But say it was like this right here. It's pretty similar. This just has some smudges the dishwasher, so I'm going to select that. And let's go ahead and decrease the clarity. Sharpness just a little bit. And bump up, bumped down the contrast, and then bump up the overall amount. Pretty good, right? Turn these on, off, on, off. That is how to quickly get rid of a bunch of smudges. On stainless steel. Of course, you could use the Healing Brush or the clone stamp tool as well, but you gotta do that like one at a time. And I find that just this little quick trick helps a lot 52. Replacing Photos, Wall Art, and TV Images in Photoshop: In this lesson, I'll show you how to replace photographs or our work with stock photos that are other photos that you might find online. For example, this is a photo of me and my family, but if I was selling this house, I wouldn't want us to be in this photo up here. I found this photo right here. This is just a random landscape photography photo. I use unsplash.com for a lot of stock photography. It's free to use. It's good to give credit to our photographers out there. So shout out to Cal visuals who took this photo? Big Sur. So the first thing to do is get your photo or your image as close as possible to what you're replacing. So I'm going to zoom in here over to this part of the fireplace and drop the opacity of the photo on top quite a bit. And then I'm going to just kinda move this down until it covers the whole image. Then I want to fix the angle. To do that, you can hold the Command key on a Mac Control on a PC and then take any of the edges or corners. And it basically warps the photos so you can manipulate it so it looks like it's tilted back. Pull one side forward, angle it so that it matches the frame here. I'm going to do this and then I'm going to make the whole thing a little bit smaller. You can even just take each corner and pin it there. This is not a square photo though, so I don't want it to get too squished. So something like this might look good then to bring back my opacity that makes sure it looks fine. So that's the first step. But then what I'm going to do is I need to cut out part of this image because obviously we have these frames in front of it and this other stuff. So to do that, I need to make a selection. Let me see what happens if I take my quick selection tool and I paint over this image. I could do it this way. Although that's not perfect and the edges don't look that clean. Although let's see if I just yeah, Now I'm gonna do it manually. Sometimes that might work. I'm going to take my Polygonal Lasso Tool and just get in here and follow the edge. Because the edge of this image, it actually has some chromatic aberration going on with that purple line. But because it's a little blurred out, we're going to get a little bit of forgiveness for not getting these lines exactly perfect. So I'm just going to go around here, go around this little rock thing that's sitting here up and around this. And then close off. Like that's fine. Then I'm going to zoom out. And for my go back to my polygonal lasso tool, I think my feathering, I'm just gonna put out one pixel. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the stock photo, turn it on. There's different ways you can do this, but one of the most forgiving ways is to actually use a layer mask. So I'm going to create a layer mask with this photo. And now what I'm going to do if this is set to white and I press Delete, it, deletes the inside of this selection. So we need to inverse our selection, which you can do by going up to Select Inverse or Shift Command I on Mac and then press the Delete key. Now I'm going to get out of that mask and you can see that it did a pretty good job at blending in there. Now, I need to add a little bit of a blur here that's going to match the blur that I have with the other photos. I'm going to take a blur, gaussian blur, and let's just do something that's going to match like 1.3. It's pretty good. And maybe even add a little bit of a drop shadow, select that layer, Double-click it. Super small drop shadow. So it kinda blends into the frame a bit more. Something like that. Two good. Remember we're zoomed in on here and the full quality, if we zoom out, hey, that's pretty dang good. So those are the steps to doing that. This is a pretty complicated photo. Sometimes you can get away with no blur. You can get away with not having to mask it out. But I wanted to show you this whole process so that you know the steps in case you do need to do those things. Alright, thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in another lesson. 53. Editing iPhone photos vs. Professional Camera Photos: In this tutorial, I want to show you the difference between editing a raw photo from a professional camera and an iPhone photos. So you don't have these two photos, but these are the ones I took during that lesson, earlier in the class. And you can already see that the quality is not as good. There's a lot of noise in this image, especially if I zoom in, you can probably see some of that digital looking grain. And to be honest, if this is zoomed out and it's on a small screen, It's not terrible. We can still do a lot of the techniques that will improve this photo like going to the Transform tool legacy of vertical. Well, not really fix that automatically auto. Nope, but we can go to our upright tool and we should be able to make these lines of these cabinets a little bit straighter. So that's like the biggest issue with that wide lens. And I was shooting this on an iPhone 13. So the quality of cameras are getting better and better. And even with the new Pro iPhone and other smartphones, you get raw capabilities. But that doesn't mean that it's comparable yet to a DSLR or mirrorless camera whose sensor is much, much bigger. So if you ever use the transform tool and you get these white borders, just click the constraint crop and that will automatically crop it in. So this is automatically better in terms of the edit. The biggest difference when it comes to edit, the difference in editing is with exposure. And so if I come in here and I try to boost my shadows, you're gonna get a lot more grain. You just don't have a lot of information. It does produce a more balanced photo from the get-go. If we compare it to Let's look at this was sort of like the mid-range where I was trying to expose to the cabinets and the foreground and the background gets a little over exposed. But we have so much more information in the shadows and the highlights that we can use in this photo. So even if I bring down my whites and I bring up my shadows, we're not getting a lot of noise in the areas of the shadows because the raw capture just contains so much more information. Here, especially this is a nicely bright room, but if this was in a dark bathroom or a room with no windows, are few windows and not a lot of natural light, this photo would look kind of like trash. It just would not look good when it's on a full screen. So that's the biggest difference. As I mentioned. Of course, with newer phones, newer sensors, it's going to get better if you have a camera that has the Roth photo option, you definitely want to use the raw photos, which will have more information. Using the different lenses is great. You now have a wide-angle lens and a more telephoto or standard lens is this one right here. And it's not terrible. And it might not even look that bad on your screen. But you just don't have those capabilities. Adding clarity, even just a little bit starts to make it look a little crunchy and weird. Adding saturation. We want to be very careful. I would say that the advice is just be super subtle with your edits, you're already getting a somewhat processed image from most phones in terms of exposure, colors, contrast. So really all you want to do is play with cropping and then the upright, straight tool in the transform panel. So hopefully this helps you out. If you have questions about this, let me know. Otherwise, if you are serious about real estate photography, makes sure you're investing in a DSLR or mirrorless camera. There's great deals for used cameras out there. Even the entry-level DSLR is from companies like Canon or Nikon. You can probably get one for a few hundred dollars used from sites like k.com, KE h.com or BH photo video.com, or your local camera store, or check out your local Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, that kind of place too. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in another tutorial. 54. What is Virtual Staging? What Tools Should I Use?: In this lesson, I'm going to talk about virtual staging, which is making an empty room looked like a home by adding furniture. You've probably seen this before. Perusing through Zillow listings, Something's feels a little bit off and you realize, oh wait, that furniture isn't real, that picture on the wall isn't real. That TV screen, it has the same show exactly on every channel at the same moment in every room is helped sell a home because it shows people what it could possibly look like and it makes it more of a home than just an empty house. The tools aren't perfect though, and I'm going to talk about a couple options for you to use online. But there's actually been a super exciting development while I was recording this class with Adobe Photoshop, where you can actually use generative AI to have within Photoshop, create artwork for the wall furniture right within the app, and it's included with Photoshop. I'll be covering how to do that in the next lesson. There are tools like home-style are.com, which is an online app where you can actually upload your photos, include they have a bunch of furniture and stuff. This is probably the simplest method. It does cost money to use these tools, but the results are okay and it's easy to use. Then there are the W14 you options like Box brownie.com. There's other services out there too, but you're going to be paying anywhere between 1030, $50, her photo. And unless that's something your agents paying for, then that's likely not something you're going to do yourself. There's even more complicated software like Autodesk 3ds Max, which is DIY. It's a completely separate application. If you're interested in, you can check that out, but I don't teach that myself. I am going to teach you how to do this in Photoshop using the new generative AI method. And you get pretty close to the results you'll find in home-style are and box brownie. It takes a little bit of time and practice, but let's head over to Photoshop and see how to do it. 55. Virtual Staging in Photoshop with Generative AI Features: Hey friends, Photoshop has changed dramatically since I even started making this course. And with the new AI art generation tools that are out there, photoshop has added this option for generating images within photoshop. Currently I am using the Beta version of Photoshop, which if you go to create a Creative Cloud app and you click on beta apps, you can download this At the time you're watching this. This might be a feature that's already exists in the normal Photoshop version. But all of this furniture was created with this tool, which basically allows me with a text-based prompt to be able to create an add different types of furniture like this or wall art, right within Photoshop. I don't have to find PNG images are purchased stock images. It can be done right within Photoshop, which is pretty cool. Now of course some of this stuff doesn't look amazing. It kinda looks like the fake stock image that you find in a lot of real estate photography. But for a quick sort of a job, it does the trick and it's only going to get better and better and better. So let me show you the process for how to do this in Photoshop. I'm going to use the living room. One photo, which is a somewhat edited version of this photo. And what you wanna do is open it up in Photoshop. If this is only available in the Beta version, obviously you need to open it up in the Beta version and makes sure that the contextual tab bar is open on your screen. What you need to do then is create a mask or a marquee around the area you want to generate art. So for example, if I was doing it over on this wall here, I might just add a little box like this. Then the task bar pops up. Here. You can click Generate, Fill, and then you describe what you want to see. A round mirror and you click Generate. It might take a minute. It's using the Adobe Firefly AI system to create this artwork or whatever images that it's going to create based off of its stock portfolio and everything like that. So now we see that it popped up with an option which is pretty cool and it gives you three options you can click through. If you're not happy with any of these options, you can click Generate again. If you are happy, then you just see that it opens up here as a new layer. You can also give feedback by giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Now, one thing that you'll notice though, is if I try to move this around and I'm going to move this taskbar down low. It's created, it's sort of generated that whole mask, right? So that whole mark key that I created, it's generating. So we can't just simply move this around. What we can do though, is we can add or subtract from this. So if I select the layer mask here, I can click Subtract. And if I turn off the bottom layer, you can kinda see what I'm subtracting and you might be able to fine tune it. Sometimes it also generates parts of the image that you might not want, or you could even add from here. So that doesn't look too bad. Let me try one more option for art. So I'm going to turn that off. And let's start again. This time I'm just going to use the Rectangular Marquee Tool. Let's actually leave that on there and let's do something right here. Abstract piece of wall art. You'll need to play around with the prompt, the texts that you're giving it. Because it does it always return exactly what you want and you can be as specific as you want. So here we have this. That's kinda cool. This is, I think this is better. This is my favorite one. So that looks pretty good. So I'm going to leave that on there. But maybe I do want to move it around. So then you can use your standard Photoshop skills to edit this. And what I mean by that is I can take my objects selection tool. I can hover over to this. Let me click a marquee around this art and it's making that selection. Now I can go back to the image part itself. And copy it and paste it. So now we just have, I'm turning off that bottom layer. Now we just have the artwork without the bottom or the background. So I can move this up and position it up a little bit higher. For example, we can quickly add a shadow to this by double-clicking it and opening up drop shadow. And let's just reset to default and then play around with this. I think the shadow should go on the bottom right side, something like that looks pretty good. Trying to make it just look a little bit more natural. Something like that works pretty good. You can move item or items around that way. Now let me show you how I quickly did the couch. So I took my Marquee Tool and I just made a big rectangle here, a small blue couch. And you can see for this one, it didn't really work. The couch is the wrong direction. This one's better, but it's just like not really a good catch that fits this room as small. Let's say mid-century. Stylish blue couch. Real estate photography. Sometimes giving keywords or key phrases like that will improve what it, what it results in. You can also notice that in the background and change the table back here. And that just looks funky. So these ones look okay, but still not great. So let's start from scratch. And I just am showing you this process because I want to show you what actually happens. It's not just like a one-click wonder. I'm going to create a marquee tool, but I'm not going to touch the edge this time. Let's try it right here. A modern, blue mid-century couch. Stylish, simple real estate photography. Alright, so here we have a few more options. This one looks pretty good, but it made some weird design choices in the background. So here's where I would go in, subtract from the mask. Maybe even take my, let's see where am I, my Quick Selection Tool. And select everything above the couch. Select and Mask. Then delete it from above the couch like that. Let's subtract a little bit from over here. I don't know why it did. That. It adds a shadow which is cool, makes it look like it's fitting in the room. You would find tune it. So I wanted to switch over to this photo because I wanted to just show you that this one, this couch I got, the prop was simple, it was a blue couch. I just kept generating new versions of it until I found the right one. But what I did was I changed the color slightly. So I did an object select, and I just selected the couch itself and made a new layer. And then I added a hue saturation adjustment layer that you see here. And then if you add these adjustment layers and you click this button right here is the box with the arrow pointing down. It applies it just to the layer beneath. So here you can see if I want change the that was for the coffee table, but for the couch, if I want to change it to a different shade. Here, I can do that. Although it looks like I didn't get the bottom of that couch side, I have to fix that selection. Later on. I also added a bit of a blur. So with the layer itself selected, I went to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, and I added one to two pixel blur just to soften it up so it looked like more of a photo rather than like this crystal clear image that's generated with AI. And I find that helps blend it together. Kinda thing the shadow, the saturation, the contrast. You have to play with all of these things to try to match what your photo looks like. But I just wanted to show you this generative AI feature in Photoshop because it's a really cool tool that you can add to your arsenal. It's actually the quality if you play around with it is just as comparable as a lot of these expensive services or purchasing stock, our stock photography that you can add to your images. And it's something that you can upsell to your clients. In terms of adding virtual staging into a package. Play around with it. It's only gonna get better with time. So learn it, learn the tool, and definitely use it to your advantage in terms of your photography. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in another lesson. 56. How to Deliver Photo Files to Clients: Welcome to this new section of the core is all about the business of real estate photography. In this lesson, I'll cover how to deliver photos to clients whomever you're working with. They're going to want to get the final file somehow. You could just e-mail them. But I suggest using a Cloud storage service for this simple tools like Google Drive Dropbox. They fit the bill, they do what you need. You can create folders organized and I find it very helpful to have all of the photos online in the cloud so that you can access them on the go when you're out there on a phone or while you're traveling or wherever, you don't want to be stuck traveling out of the house and have a client really need access to your photos and you not be able to deliver them to them. So I think this is the best way you get free storage to start, and it's very affordable if you do start to use up a lot of space. If you're looking for a website that's a little bit more professional where clients can actually look through a set of photos. Maybe you have them pick, selects. Before you do full edits. You have fold deliverability where they can download and there's no weird sharing links or anything. There are a few more advanced options like pixie set, Zen, folio, smug mug and Squarespace. And with all of these tools, you can also build a portfolio or a full website on top of this, these are tools that have the website aspect as well as the file photo delivery management system on top of them. All of these platforms like Zen folio that you see here, they're going to have gallery templates that make it super easy to create a professional looking website. They'll also have secure sharing. So if you go under Feature checkout, the share options in here you can see what it might look like when you're sharing a gallery with clients where they can download high-resolution, medium, low resolution, you can give them those options. They can comment on photos, say like you're working with a client. They say, Oh, I like this, but can you change this furniture out? Can you fix this? There's a weird shadow here or whatever they can comment. You can also, let's go back under their photo proofing. Were they save their favorites and you know, it can even connect with light room where they'll pick their favorites, ends and folio. And then it will automatically save those as favorites in Lightroom, which is pretty advanced. So that's n folio. Here's pixie set, very, very similar. It's all, all pretty much the same. It's just going to be a different price point for all of these platforms. But these are the highest rated ones that I have students around the world using to grow their photography businesses. Squarespace is another option. They have add-ons for things like photo delivery, templates and stuff. If you're just looking for a simple way to build a website, squarespace is the way to go. I prefer WordPress websites where I get a little bit more customization, but Squarespace is easy. I'm also going to show you Adobe portfolio, which is included with your Creative Cloud account, which is a great free, meaning you have access to it way to create a portfolio. So I'll cover that in a future lesson. But hopefully this lesson helps give you some ideas for how to deliver your photos to clients. If you have follow-up questions, let me know. Otherwise, it's pretty simple. You just got to figure out what method you want to use porcelain personally, I use Google Drive for all of this. It's simple. People know how to use Google. Thanks so much for watching and see you in the next lesson. 57. Tips for Creating a Real Estate Photography Portfolio: In this lesson, we'll cover building an online portfolio, some tips for choosing the right photos as well as platforms that I recommend. I already mentioned a few platform options. The other one I wanted to include in this list is Wix. Wix.com is super easy drag-and-drop, and it's free to get started. You can't get your own domain name URL for free. And there will be small Wix ads on your website. But it's a great way to just start building out a website. And if you want to eventually pay for the upgrade to remove those ads, get your own URL, you can do that, and so it's free to get started. Squarespace is also simple to use drag-and-drop templates, but it does cost more than these other options I've found. And then WordPress, wordpress is for more advanced users. I have a full WordPress course. There's lots of tutorials out there online on WordPress. But it does take a little bit of tech knowledge to figure out how to get up and running. I want to talk about Adobe portfolio because it's a freeway to get started. And I'm going to do a quick demo of how it works. But before I do that, I just want to talk briefly about how to build out a portfolio. And in general, my philosophy is less is more. You don't need to show every single photo that you've taken of a house on your main portfolio. Think about what is a client coming to your portfolio to see, they're seeing, can you take beautiful photos? Can you take a variety of beautiful photos? And then they want to contact you. So that's pretty much all you want to have on a website or portfolio. If you are really serious about real estate photography, you don't want to mix this up with other styles of photography. If you do wedding photography, wildlife photography, don't mix and match those photos with your real estate photography in your portfolio. There are times where having a website with dedicated spaces for each type of professional work you do can work. But if you're really trying to launch a real estate photography business, make your website dedicated to that. Then the next question you might have for me is what about using something like Instagram or another social media platform to put out your photos and to create your portfolio. Instagram is a great place to put out photos, but as we've seen over the past ten plus years, the priority of it as a photo sharing platform and a space for photographers has decreased. And while you can use it to find clients, I understand that people are still on Instagram and all the other social media platforms. I don t think it's the best place to build out your portfolio. You just don't have control over it. And there's so much limitation in the sizing of images, the visibility of images. And even like adding links and information, it's just less you can do on your own website. So I highly recommend having a website separate than your social media accounts. Do both, but focus and prioritize on building out your own website burst because if you want to get clients, yeah, you can send people or show people your Instagram account. Maybe people will find you through someone referring you and sharing your page. But at the end of the day, having a website with a clean portfolio that's not competing with the thousands of other things the algorithm is trying to press out to people. It's going to work a lot better. So let's jump into Adobe portfolio and I'll show you how easy it is to use 58. Creating a Quick Portfolio Website with Adobe Portfolio: Let's jump into Adobe portfolio and I'll show you how easy it is to use. As I mentioned, it's free with a Creative Cloud account. You'll want to sign into adobe.com and go to portfolio.adobe.com. Then go and click Continue as your name. Once you're logged in. Here, you can see all the different templates that you can start using. Really, it's up to you to find one that you like. But again, my philosophy is simple, is better for real estate photography. I also like a light white background. It just kinda goes with the vibe of what most real estate agents and people selling houses or Airbnb are going for. But of course, if you like that more stylistic black, dark background, you can do that too. So I'm just going to go ahead and click this under AS1. Once this is open, you can see more info about what this looks like. You can see what it looks like on the tablet or phone. All of these templates are going to re-size for each device. And the way that most of these portfolios work is that they have the hero image here that you can click into and then you can see the full gallery, which is pretty cool. I'm going to click Use this theme. And then it's truly drag and drop. It automatically puts in my name. I could change my to my purse, my business name. I can just change it to a call to action. So California real estate photography, whatever you wanna call it. Then down below we can click Create, add a page, and then we can add a custom sub page, which is the one we saw where we'll add the photos. You can even import a Lightroom album. Now this is Lightroom from Lightroom Cloud, not Lightroom Classic. But if you have edited your photos and classic exported them, you can actually upload them or just add them to the Lightroom app on your computer and then sync it up here, which is pretty cool. Or we can just go to page I'll call this Claremont. Maybe you have one for each address or you have these destinations, which is part of the navigation, the menu of the website. You can create a new one or you can make this your homepage. Maybe we just want this to be the homepage gatt be a gallery itself. So let's open that and now let's go and open up a photo grid. And then we can upload our files. Uploading a handful of photo files randomly. It would be better to go through them ahead of time and pick and choose the ones that you want. But you could also do this and then you can kinda see how they look on the website. Once they're uploaded, you can click this photo grid button to manage the images. And here you can create a custom order. You can just simply drag and drop the photos so that they're in the order that you like. You can add captions. Back here on the main page. If I click this again, we can edit the grid style. Maybe we want a few more images per line. Can make the width of this portfolio a little bit smaller. You can see you can customize it pretty much however you want. To add a new section. You can just go and hover over at the bottom or above and click the plus sign. And so maybe you have your full gallery below, but you want to add like a hero image. Maybe you do video, anything like that. You can do that. You can also add a contact form at the bottom. That might be a good idea to have at the bottom of your homepage. So for example, if I was actually building out this site, I would put in an assortment of my best photos from my real estate photography on the homepage. You can customize everything from the logo. You can add a logo onto your website. You could turn on or off navigation. Maybe you just want it to be this clean page with just the page header or you can even delete this or customize it just with photo, some simple information. And then the contact button at the bottom to turn off our footer, make it super clean. You can edit the background colors, the fonts, everything over here in these settings. Another cool thing is we can switch to a different theme by clicking the theme button. And let's just switch over to, let's go Hagen. And it will update the site for us. So with one click of a button, we can see what it looks like. You can click the Preview button to really see what it looks like on any device. And this is good because we can see on this view, maybe there's too many photos here. Maybe you want to have one per row or just on the homepage, we just want like one image, then go to the galleries. So once you're ready to publish, you can click the Publish button and then you'll get a website link to this portfolio and you're good to go. You could actually purchase a domain name using like godaddy.com or name cheap.com for forward that URL to this portfolio, which would be a super affordable way to create a photography portfolio without having to pay for the platform like Zen folio, SmugMug, pixies, etc. So hopefully this little tutorial helps you out if you're using Adobe portfolio or if you're using another platform, hopefully you got some advice for how to build out a good-looking portfolio. I'll see you in another lesson. Bye 59. How to Find Your First Clients: Welcome to this lesson on finding your first clients. There's two steps to finding clients. Step one is to set yourself up for success by building out your portfolio. To do this, if you don't have a job lined up, you might need to photograph your own home, clean up your rooms as much as possible and make it look as nice as you can and practice taking photos. Then offer this service to friends and family, even if they're not selling their homes. Taking photos will give you practice and it will help you build out a portfolio. When someone's coming to your website, they'll want to see a variety of shots. If it's just one location, one shoe, they might be unlikely to hire you compared to seeing that you've done a lot of this before. It's a fake it till you make it type of thing where you want to have a big portfolio as much as possible. So reach out to friends, family members, anyone that you know who keeps their house clean that might look nice and ask if you could take photos of their house. And of course, if someone is actually moving, offer your services for free, I don't mind doing a little bit of work for free in the beginning to build out your portfolio. And then the second step is literally just putting yourself out there. Local cold e-mail, cold call, real estate agents, agent groups in your area and send them your portfolio, send them your name, contact information, let them know that you are a new photographer in the area. You're looking to add clients for work. These real estate agents are always looking for people to have on their roll-call in case someone that they're working with isn't doing a good job. They're on vacation, they're blowing up and they need more people to be able to reach out to and take photos for them. And building these relationships is really how you're going to have long-term success with this game. Similarly, message, local landlords or real estate agents do a little bit of sleuth work. Go on Craigslist, go on Airbnb, gone any apartment website, try to find the contact information for the owners or the hose on Airbnb, you can literally just message to the host and let them know that you're a real estate photographer. This is actually a great way to build out your portfolio. You could do this and offer it for free, although I would probably try to charge for it. You can message hosts that have listings that don't look so great compared to the other ones and offer to take better photos for them. This is very similar to starting any kind of business. Start local, reach out to people. Cold, call them. Let people know in your circle that you're doing this so that if they have contacts, if someone to some of their friends is moving or maybe they there Small Landlord, they'll be able to refer you. Another thing you can do is look at local social media groups face, there's often a neighborhood Facebook group for every city or every neighborhood or platforms like nextdoor.com. I often find people posting about housing, posting about wanting photographers. And so you've got to pay attention there. A lot of these groups often will allow people in the area to post or promote their own businesses on a certain day of the week or something. It depends on the group. Pay attention to the rules, but you can promote yourself there There's also landlord and realtor, real estate agent groups out there. There's websites like bigger pockets.com out there where you can create a profile. There's forums, there's people always ask them for services like this. You can put yourself out there and connect with the agents there. Again, that's where you're going to find the long-term work is working with agents. I promise you, if you're doing all of these things, if you're reaching out to people, cold emailing them. If you're finding new people through social media groups, you will find work. It just takes a little bit of time and effort upfront 60. How Much to Charge for Real Estate Photography Services: The last question you might have right now is what about pricing? How much do you charge for your services? This is going to be a huge range depending on your experience, where you live, what the market is like here in Los Angeles. It's super competitive because houses are super expensive. But there's also a lot of photographers. So you have to balance that. Or maybe you live in an area where there's not as many photographers and you can charge more. Or maybe you live in an area where there's not a lot of turnover. And so these jobs are going to be fewer, fewer and far between. So you do have to charge more. It really is going to depend on your location and making this a full-time job, again, is going to depend if there's enough work out there. My advice is always to go back to your hourly rate. So figure out what your hourly rate is, your ideal hourly rate is, and calculate how much time are you going to spend taking photos? How much time are you going to spend editing photos? How much time are you going to spend emailing and working with that client, delivering those photos? Total, all of that up. And that's going to be a package price. In the beginning, you might not know what this is and it might take a few times to figure out what this truly is going to be. But I don't like the idea of giving clients and hourly rate. I want to give a package rate, so I want it to be clean and say for one home, you're going to get 50 photos back. You're going to get exterior photos, interior photos, aerial photos. And it will be X price, $1,000, $200, whatever it is. If you can grow and start to get consistent work, add in the cost of the equipment that you have to buy or if you have to rent equipment. The education that you have. All of that comes into play with running a business for yourself. And you can't just pay yourself for the one-hour that your location taking photos, that would not be worth your time. So this is going to take some time. But if you have follow-up questions about rates or if you have an idea, please let me know in the class or join the photography and friends group and community where there's other photographers going through the same process with you. And we'll be able to more help you more with your specific situation. Thank you so much for watching this lesson and I hope it gives you some great advice for starting your business and finding your first clients.