Since Valentine's Day was one of the themes of this month's tool challenge, I wanted to choose my topic with love in mind. Had I been writing about money tools, I would have reworked my previous posts about the benefits of blogging on AR with backlinks to an IDX Wordpress site - but I've done that already, and anyhow, love is more powerful than money.
And I have a new love when it comes to tools. I've been into photography since I entered my teens. I had a real darkroom and used to develop my own photos, and when Photoshop first came out, I bought version 1.0 and spent the time learning to use it. But keeping up with the updates was expensive, and the program was sophisticated way beyond what I needed - I wasn't doing color separations for magazine covers, after all.
So a bunch of years back, I switched to Photoshop Elements, a much cheaper version that actually did everything I needed, and did it very well - or at least I thought so. But during last month's contest, I called Sheri Sperry - MCNE® to talk about the excellent photos in her blogs. She put me on the phone with her husband Rick, who does all of their photography, and he shared his secret - he's using Adobe Lightroom, a program I had never tried.
Rick told me it was very easy to use, and that it is available in a cloud version - and thus always updated and current - and is bundled with the full-featured Photoshop and some great mobile app versions for the measly pittance of $9.99 a month. I immediately knew that I had to try it, and Adobe made that easy with a free 7 day trial - I used 2 days of that trial, and signed up.
The programs come with a good tutorial suite that is comprehensive and easy to follow - within a couple of hours, I was using the program to make dramatic differences in photos I had previously done my best with using Elements. Rick was right, it is easy to use, but in all honesty, my experience with Photoshop really shortened the learning curve. As a disclaimer, if you haven't had any experience with a sophisticated photo editor, you'll need to invest some time learning the program. That's not because it's hard - it just does so amazingly much that it takes a while to explore everything.
Here's an example using a not very good, unedited photo of a listing I took a couple of years ago. With Elements, I was able to get rid of the dumpster, but it took about an hour of painful cut-and-pasting, and the results weren't spectacular. And that wasn't the only problem. The colors were flat and lifeless, and it took a while longer to get everything to a minimally acceptable level. I wasn't thrilled and it wasn't a great use of my time.
Using the base photo above, this is what I did in 5 minutes using Lightroom and Photoshop (they work in concert in the cloud version and it's easy to switch back and forth between the two).
The dumpster was gone in a couple of minutes this time, using an amazing Photoshop capability called content-aware fill - somehow the program can make a great guess as to what's behind the dumpster, and when you remove the dumpster, Photoshop replaces it with that guess. The rest of the enhancements were done in Lightroom, and took maybe another couple of minutes. And I might have spent another couple perfecting the image if I were going to publish it as a property photo.
I've been spending a lot of time having fun with these two programs, and I know they're going to make a big difference in our future listing photos, as well as with all of the other photography I do. If you have been using one of the free photo editors, you should treat yourself to at least the 7 day free trial of these two killer programs. They're well worth the effort of climbing that learning curve - for both love and money.
Thank you, Rick Sperry!!
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