In my last post, I opined that proper lighting is the single most important element in your listing images. The feature that is most often mentioned in a listing pitch is "This home is light and bright." If your images do not convey "light and bright" I think buyers will move on. If the photo is too dark, or washed out, will anyone be able to see if the home is staged to perfection, or if the focus is perfect?
If you try your best to flood the room with even diffuse light, but if you still end up back at the office with photos that do not convey light and bright, there is hope. Most professional strength photo editing software packages provide several ways to correct this problem. Photoshop has at least five ways to do anything. The trick is to find all five ways and see which one works best for your particular image. Here are five ways to lighten and brighten an image in Photoshop CS3.
•1 The Auto modes - Auto Levels, Auto Contrast - Auto Color. With an image loaded in Photoshop, click on "image" on the tool bar at the top of the page. A menu will appear. From the menu hover your cursor over the word "adjustments" and a fly out menu will appear. Move your mouse pointer over to the fly out menu and you will be able to select Auto Levels, Auto Contrast or Auto Color. Try each option. If it helps great! If it does not you can undo the change by selecting "Edit" on the top tool bar and select "undo" to reverse the effects of the change. If after you undo the effect, you decide it really was better with the change, go back and click Edit again and the undo button is now a redo button. Cool huh! Another great option lies just little lower in the edit menu. Notice the selection to "fade" the effect you just did. This is a great tool. In my opinion the auto mode will almost always over do the desired effect. The fade button gives you a way to tone it down a bit..
•2 The Manual modes - Levels, Curves, Brightness/Contrast, Shadows and Highlights, Exposure. Each of these tools will open up an options box that will give you manual control over several aspects of lightness and brightness. Levels will show you a "histogram" that illustrates the balance of lights and dark information in your image. It is useful for setting the absolute limits of light and dark in your image. There will be three triangles beneath the histogram that you can click and drag with your mouse. After studying the histograms of professional photos I will often drag the leftmost triangle to the right until "10" appears in the box next to it. I will drag the rightmost triangle to the left until "245" appears in the box next to it. You can move the triangle in the middle to adjust the mid tones to bring out detail that is lost in shadows.
Once you click OK you can undo, redo, and fade this adjustment using the "Edit" menu as described above. The remaining adjustment options give you access to sliders that you can use to adjust various aspects of lightness and brightness. Oddly, I find the Brightness/Contrast adjustment the least useful. Instead try out the Shadows and Highlights button. This button will automatically adjust various parameters when you click it, but the dialog box that opens will give you control over all of the different adjustments that it has adjusted for you. Try this one next. Once the dialog box opens on the screen, find the sliders labeled, Color Correction, and Midtone Contrast. Kick the Color Correction up to about +45, and the Midtone Contrast up to about +30. As with all the Photoshop automatic adjustments this one will over often shoot perfection. After you click OK use the Edit / Fade Shadow & Highlight adjustor to fade the effect back to about 65% or so. This technique alone will lighten and brighten many of your interior shots.
•3 Layer Mode Adjustments - The disadvantage of each of the above techniques is that they will alter your original image. Before applying any of those techniques to your images always make a copy using "save as" to preserve your original image. One of the advanced features of Photoshop CS3 is the ability to use "layers" to adjust your images. Layers were inspired by the clear acetate sheets that illustrators use to edit an image without altering the underlying original. An illustrator can stack many layers in a stack. The layers above will modify the appearance of layers below without actually changing the layers below. You can use layers to apply many of the adjustments I have already described without altering the original image. Any adjustment that is applied as a layer can be turned on and off independently to make sure it is doing something positive. There is a simple way to lighten an image by combining layers, but using layers properly is probably a subject for a dedicated post or two.
•4 Selective Adjustments - Sometimes when you try to lighten up a dark area, you will end up burning another area. Another of the powerful features of most photo editing software is the ability to select certain areas of an image to edit. If your example you have a beautiful view out of a picture window that is light and bright, but your room is dark. You can use tools in Photoshop to "select" and brighten the room but exclude the window from the selection. This allows you to brighten the room without washing out your view.
Some say the ability to expertly "select" portions of an image is the single biggest key to mastering Photoshop. One of the sure fire ways to brighten the appearance of almost any room is to carefully select just the ceiling, and brighten it up a little more than the rest of the room. The technique of "Selecting" elements of an image and processing them as separate layers is the heart of the process we have developed at Mio to optimize your listing images. It is not uncommon for us to end up with a dozen or more layers in a finished image. I will delve into this further in coming posts.
•5 Color Adjustment - Similar to selecting individual parts of an image to adjust, Photoshop allows you to select individual colors to adjust. It took us awhile to uncover this secret technique for brightening an image. It is quite common for certain cameras or certain lighting conditions to result in a color cast that gives an image an overall tint.
Interior shots under incandescent light will often have a yellow or golden cast. Interior shots with sunlight streaming in a window will sometimes exhibit a blue cast. One of the most effective ways to lighten an image under these circumstances is to isolate the color of the yellow or blue cast and adjust that color by itself. You can make this adjustment on a separate layer by selecting "Layer" on the tool bar and hovering your mouse pointer over "New Adjustment Layer" in the drop down menu. From the New Adjustment Layer menu select "Hue and Saturation." A dialog box will open telling you that a new layer will be created called Hue and Saturation. Click OK. In the next dialog box that opens the first step will be to select the color of the cast that we want to correct. Click the down arrow next to the Edit box and select either blue or yellow. The word blue of yellow should now appear in the edit box and any adjustment we make with the sliders should just affect that color.
To further refine the color we want to adjust notice that your mouse pointer will now look like an eyedropper when you hover over any part of your image. Next position your eyedropper over a part of your image where the color cast is most noticeable. The ceiling is usually a good choice. This will fine tune your adjustment to affect only the color of the cast. Using the saturation slider and the brightness slider eliminate the color cast and notice how the whites become whiter and brighter throughout the image. You can combine this technique with "selection" to brighten other parts of your image in a very natural way.
I hope this information will help those who are equipped and inclined to try it themselves. If you are not so inclined, or even if you are, these are services we provide at Mio - Marketing Image Optimization. Our goal is to make our service so convenient and inexpensive that even those who can tackle these tasks on their own will find it more cost effective to allocate their time selling homes instead.
To see illustrations of the results of these processes, please stop by our web site at http://LightBrightListings.com
We would be pleased to hear from you.
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