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Lesson Info

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 closed down some of these tabs, the tool bar 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 shoot. 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 with ambient light, but I am not going to end up doing any sort of combining flam bent style with this photo just because I like the natural aesthetic of this photo. All right. So let's get over to the right hand side. You'll see that there's a lot of drop down panels or windows and you could drop down um 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 w...

ith in lightroom, 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 resets 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 or 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. So you can see up at the top. The first thing we have in the basic slider is or panel is some color adjustments. You have 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 Fuji film camera. It has the Fuji film color presets built in. And when you shoot with a raw photo, you actually have to apply them here in lightroom. So I typically edit or shoot real estate photos with the pro via look. And you can see if I hover over this, it kind of 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 and 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 whites right. And 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 bright 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 wanna adjust the highlights or just 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 airier. I might even bring up my highlights depending on if I'm showing what's in the outside of the window or not. Same with the whites as long as we're not overexposing anything that's we wanna 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 eye button, you just click it and hold it. So here's the before and after I kind of like the warmth that we had before with the cameras white balance. So I'm gonna change the white balance to a shot actually. And 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 de haze here in this panel. Those are more for landscape photos, close ups, that kind of thing. But I will, 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 clarity can be cool too, but that's more of a preferential style. And then with vibrance and saturation saturation will bring up the color saturation for all the colors in 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 like 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 desaturated sort of not moody look but clean look but in a room like this with the nursery, some nice photos on the wall, nice colors on the wall. I might just boost the saturation just a little bit. So that's the basic panel and that is a couple 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 bo top, right. And then you could set points in the middle to increase or decrease the exposure. So say I wanna 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 gonna bring those back down and that's a typical what you'll hear in photography S curve, which is it kind of looks like an s which adds contrast to our image. Maybe you don't like contrast and we wanna 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 b before or after, you can press the backslash key. You can also see that down below by clicking this before and after it looks like a why, why? And you can click through this to see the different views of the before and after look, the other main panels that I wanna 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, 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. Um With that low iso there's also a new D 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. And 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 sort of 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 is an important panel to check out just doing, making sure that you do have sharp some sharpening if you are shooting raw lens corrections. This is another really important one. So when we're shooting with wide, 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 Fuji film camera lens does not have a preset. So I have to do it manually. But if you had for example, the cannon 16 millimeter then or 14 to F F-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 V vignetting and removing the warping around the edge. If it doesn't have your cust your lens profile automatically in here, you can do it manually by going up here to manual and you could adjust the distortion. So for example, if you're, if we're, our 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 sort of 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 adds a black vignette for real estate photography, you really wanna 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 lightroom for real estate photography. This is where we could straighten out lines. 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 just 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 auto. It's probably looking at this line right here. These lines in the middle. It's OK. 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 process is 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 a better chance of getting this perfectly straight. So I'm gonna 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 set a different, a second point. So I'm going to set another point. So we're gonna go here in the corner this. Wow. Now it knows that those two points should be vertical, right? And 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. OK. So I'm gonna go to this one. This is dining nook two. So a an important thing is if you're use doing a Flambe 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 P or these four photos that we're going to combine in Photoshop, the way it bends and warps, it's gonna be difficult to, to match perfectly. So I would do this after I do all of my flaming 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. So I could let's just see if auto fixes it. Auto does a really good job. So sometimes auto is all you need to do. Vertical, does a very similar job too. 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 the these tiles is like another good one that we want up and down. And sometimes the more you add and you can only add up to four. The 3rd and 4th 1 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 will often do at the beginning of an edit, except when I'm combining photos in the in the Flambe 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 sort of basically zoom in or crop into the photo. So I might say let's get rid of that very far left edge. We don't need to see that. I wanna see more of these knives on the right hand side though. And there you go, you could also rotate by ho 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 would 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 you'll see in the future. But for a 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 re choose this photo. Let's remove this dresser and let's make this photo the line that I want to be vertical that looks pretty good. And then the dresser is still pretty good. It's not not so bad. All right. So those are the basic editing developed tools that I will be using for a lot of my edits. There are other things healing, cloning these specific gradient mass 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.