Best App For Real Estate Photos [Expert Guide]
Investing in quality real estate photography is an important factor into your marketing strategy. It is always best to opt for a good DSLR camera with a wide-angle lens that can perfectly capture your listings in the best lighting.
However, many real estate professionals and homeowners find themselves limited by time, budget, and the skillset to work DSLR without outsourcing. Understandably, to maximize available resources, many try their hand at taking real estate photos using a smart phone.
While this may not be the best option, it certainly can get a decent job done. Moreover, once you learn the tips and tricks of your phone’s camera settings, be sure to process your images through a quality editing app. These can help in making your pictures look brighter, more vivid, with deep shadows, which all in all gets you closest to the real thing!
If you find yourself in a similar situation, we are here to guide you through taking professional real estate pictures using your smart phone and the best apps on the market today that can help you elevate your images in just a few clicks and swipes.
How Can I Take Professional Real Estate Pictures With My Phone?
Smart phones today are well equipped with features and tools that could make any ordinary scene pop out of the screen. Whether you invested in an iPhone or and Android, you are bound to get vividly crisp images with the latest models.
Some of the best ways you can take professional real estate images with a phone are:
Master Your Phone’s Camera Settings
To be able to utilize any gadget to its full potential, you must first understand both its fundamental and advanced settings. Take the time to research about your phone’s features and test them out for yourself. A few of the most notable tools we suggest looking into are:
- High Dynamic Range (HDR) mode
- If you are able to shoot in RAW format
- Learning how to properly turn on and turn off your flash, and the best scenes that need it.
- Zooming in and out.
- Panoramic settings
- Hyper lapse settings
- Adjusting the camera for low-light environments
One more essential factor to practice is taking photos without your fingers blocking the shot. It may sound unnecessary to even point out but you would be surprised just how often this can happen even to the most seasoned of phone photographers. Many times, it happens when the light source you are working with reflects off of your screen, essentially leaving you unable to see what you are shooting.
Staging Your Shot
How your scene is displayed can be just as impactful as how you take your images. It is important to practice staging your spaces so that the features you want highlighted and the angles you need to get are easier to translate through every photo taken.
Some of the best staging tips are:
- Declutter the areas by cleaning out any personal items or other things that are not relevant to the shoot. Putting too much additional items may result in a messy looking listing and prevent your viewers from feeling more relaxed as they swipe through the shots.
- Rearrange (or take out) the various pieces of furniture in order to make the room breathe better and help your potential buyers visualize a flow within your space.
- Add furniture to the foreground to increase the sense of depth.
- Take out throw rugs especially in small rooms since displaying the floors make the area look more spacious.
- Position your elements in a way that natural light can be utilized to highlight what you need it to.
- Clean up in general.
Pay Attention To Your Composition
Every listing has its own features to highlight, as well as some elements you would rather didn’t garner too much attention. It is all about how you play with the light source available and how you angle your elements that can make or break your shot.
One of the most important goals in composing your image is making the room look spacious and flowy – but not in the sense that it looks far from the real thing. You can achieve this balance by capturing images from the corner of the room and getting a good, wide view of it all.
We also suggest using the power of thirds by positioning your furniture at the one-third mark of a horizontal view. Always keep your horizontal and vertical lines leveled with the rest of the photo.
Invest in External Lenses
Just like DSLR cameras, phones also have lenses you can attach to the body. They easily clip on and add a whole different range to your gadget’s built-in capabilities. We suggest investing in an 18-millimeter wide-angle attachment for real estate phone photography since this option helps in getting realistic and details results with only minimal distortion.
Bring A Tripod
No matter the tool you use for capturing photos, the tripod is a staple in our book. Not only can you achieve sharper images, but you also allow your camera sensor to process enough natural light and capture HDR images with little to no effort!
This is by far the best way to reduce camera shake and capture images at just the right angle needed. There are many affordable tripods on the market today, ensure that you get a sturdy one that will not easily tip over with a gust of wind or with uneven terrain.
Mind The Lighting
Lighting is and always will be a crucial element to photography. The most recommended source of light is natural light because this helps with white balance, preventing color cast, and giving a natural shadow within the frame.
Because of this, keep track of weather conditions and find out the most optimal times to shoot in your listing’s location. Light is always changing so it’s best to keep practicing until you find it easier to adjust to the different hues of the sky.
Keep It Charged
Last but not the least, just like how you would take a spare battery for your DSLR on photo shoots, keep your phone’s battery life in mind as well.
Bring a charging cable for both an outlet and your car, bring a power bank, and also keep your phone charged right before heading out.
Importance of Real Estate Photo Editing
Real estate photo editing can address multiple kinds of concerns within your images. We cannot always expect to get it perfectly right in camera, especially when there are poor lighting and weather conditions that are beyond our control, which is why it is crucial to know how to edit photos.
By editing your real estate images, you can achieve the following:
- Getting straighter lines (both horizontal and vertical)
- Evening out exposure levels
- Adjusting the colors, hues, luminance, vibrancy, and saturation
- Adjusting the brightness and contrast
- Detailing blurred or distorted images
- Cropping, resizing, skewing, and similar tools
- Removing unwanted elements
- Replacing the sky
- Adding in grass or other missing elements
And so much more! The better you are at editing and the more advanced your chosen editing app or software is, the more chances you have at getting great real estate photos.
How Can I Edit Pictures Of My House?
There are many kinds of photo editing software and apps you can download at varying budget ranges. In fact, if you do not need that many advanced features or multiple users to access the account, a lot of apps have free versions that offer you great, fundamental editing tools.
Below, we break down a detailed list of our most recommended apps that you can use to edit real estate images taken on your phone.
4 Best Photo Editing Apps For Real Estate Agents in 2022
We gathered our top 4 photo editing apps for real estate below. You may download either one right into your mobile device or opt for the desktop / website version on your laptop.
Snapseed
Snapseed has been dubbed as one of the best all-around photo editing apps for both beginners and professional real estate photographers alike.
While it is best known for providing users with precise control over exposure, color, and brightness, it also comes with a wide range of other powerful editing features such as:
- Photo exposure, color, and sharpness adjustment
- Healing tools, brushes, and selective adjustments
- Built-in filters such as black and white or vintage
- Double exposure and text tools
- Cropping, rotating, and other perspective adjustments
- Lens blur and vignettes
- HDR scape
It is FREE to download and is available for both Android and iOS users.
TouchRetouch
TouchRetouch is another well-known mobile editing app, however, its primary function is to remove unwanted elements from your images. Because it is hyper focused on providing its users with the right set of tools to efficiently and seamlessly take out certain items, it has been regarded as the best in the market for the job. It can offer the following:
- Remove elements, lines, and people from photos
- Refine the details using a brush or lasso tool
- Smoothen out blemishes and wrinkles
- Duplicate objects
- Automatic mesh detection and removal
You can simply use the brush tool or a lasso tool to select the items you need out of your frame and hit “Go”. The app also does an amazing job with element replacement using a clone or copy tool. Overall, TouchRetouch helps you make images cleaner and less distracting, which guide your potential buyers to focus on the listing’s best features.
It is available for both Android and iOS users for a fee of $3.99
Canva
Canva is quite a popular tool loved by many beginners and professional photo editors. It mainly functions as a graphic design app that helps you create social media posts, presentations, videos, and other marketing collaterals.
Real estate agents can maximize this to create visually appealing marketing materials using Canva’s many customizable templates. You may also add text, logos, and other elements.
Canva is available for both iOS and Android users, as well as Windows and Mac users, with the option to access their FREE account, Pro account, or enterprise account.
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom is a favorite editing tool among more seasoned photographers. While the mobile app offers less features that its desktop version, it still offers the following fundamental tools:
- Cropping and perspective adjustments
- Presets
- Exposure, Contrast, Highlight, Shadow, Black, White, and Curve adjustments
- Temperature, Tint, Vibrancy, Saturation, and White Balance adjustments
- Vignette, Dehaze, Grain, and Clarity adjustments
- Sharpening and Noise reduction
- Chromatic Aberration and Lens Correction tools
Adobe Lightroom is available on both iOS and Android for free, with optional in-app purchases,
You’re All Set!
With the narrowed down list of the best mobile apps for real estate photo editing, you are sure to have amazing photos of your listing in just a few clicks!
