When I say improve curb appeal I do not mean

• Altering featutres of the home or
• Adding and deleting plants, trees, high tension lines or anything else that would be deceptive.

However, I take photos on cloudy or rainy days - my schedule does not give me the luxury to only take photos of homes on sunny days with a beautiful blue sky filled with clouds.  The photo below is a prime example - the row of town homes appears as bleak as the day the photo was taken.  They certainly will not enhance the appearance of an MLS entry or a blog about the subdivision

Take a look at the photo below.  I did not make any enhancements to the photo above except to add blue sky and clouds that we have on file  Everything other than the sky is exactly the same as it was in the photo above.  I didn't even edit out the newspaper on the right hand side of the photo

Is it unethical?  Absolutely not

• Mother Nature would have come by in a day or two to add the blue sky and clouds.
  
• I just made it look as though she had already been there before I took the photo.
• There is no place in the US that only has gray skies

I believe more people would be attracted to the lower photo as opposed to the original photo above.  The simple addition of blue sky even had a positive effect on the other colors in the photo.

We have the option to submit our own photos to our MLS.  Some of them look like the one above.  I prefer to take my own photos and have "blue skies smiling at me".

The good news is that it took less than 10 minutes with four simple steps to make the change.

Although there any number of photo editing software programs available we find Adobe Photoshop Ekemernts 7 the most user friendly for us.  The four steps we use can be found in "The Photoshop Elements 7 Book" by Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski.  All of the photo editing ideas in the book are far simpler than the instructions that accompany the sotware.

Step One:

Open a photo that needs the addition of a blue sky.

Step Two:

Type W to

• select the Magic Wand Tool
• Click in the area that needs blue sky and release - the tool will do the rest selecting the entire gray area.
• Do nothing further with the photo

Step Three:

• Open a stored blue sky photo
• Under Select choose All
• Under Edit choose Copy
• Close out of the blue sky photo

Step4:

• Since you closed out the blue sky photo the original photo will reappear
• On the Layer palette choose New
• Go to Edit and choose Paste into Selection
• Press Ctrl-D to Deselect

Voila!!!!  Just go to File and Save As