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In today’s day and age, more than 80% of home sales start online, making high-quality real estate photography crucial to attracting buyers’ interest. There are some extra powerful real estate photo editing techniques that can make your listing images extra eye-catching and stand out from the competition online.

In this post, we’ll share some powerful real estate photo editing techniques that will create stunning listing images and capture potential buyers’ attention in a heartbeat. 

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s take a look at why real estate photo editing is vital for real estate sales.

Why Is Real Estate Photo Editing Crucial to Sell Homes?

Real Estate Photo Editing by PhotoUp
Real Estate Photo Editing by PhotoUp

For starters, recent statistics show that buyers spend 60% of their time checking images, and only 20% read the listing description.

Additionally, 68% of potential buyers say that great photos made them want to visit the home, and homes with high-quality photos also receive 47% higher asking prices per square foot.  

There’s no denying that images are the most essential aspect of promoting real estate.

Not only can professional real estate photo editing give potential buyers a great first impression of the property, but it can also make your listing stand out from the rest. 

With the enormous competition on listing websites like Zillow and Redfin, it’s more crucial than ever that your images are alluring enough to capture buyers’ attention. 

By carefully editing images with simple techniques such as cropping and adjusting brightness/contrast levels or more advanced editing techniques as presented below, you can make properties look bigger and more inviting to viewers. 

Homey and inviting images can also help buyers establish an emotional connection to the property, which can accelerate a sale.

With that said, let’s take a look at some advanced editing techniques that will make your listing images turn heads next.

The 5 Most Powerful Real Estate Editing Techniques

Here are the 5 most powerful real estate editing techniques that will create captivating photos and make your listing stand out from the crowd. 

1. Twilight Effects

If you want your real estate photography to turn heads, you should invest in Twilight editing

Twilight photographs are very pleasing to the eye because they capture “the golden hour” at sunset which adds a romantic and mysterious glow to your photos. 

The golden hour can produce stunning pictures and can often make rooms look brighter, more inviting, and more attractive than without special lighting.

Furthermore, elegant nighttime photos can also give sellers and agents the chance to highlight aspects of a house that are hidden during daylight. Or that might not look all that great on their own.

However, the window to shoot exteriors during the golden hour is so short, and that’s where twilight editing is a powerful tool to recreate this warm and mysterious glow to any image.  

2. Virtual Staging

Virtual staging is a powerful tool that can help you transform outdated and vacant rooms into warm and inviting homes. It’ll make your listing images look stunning and stand out from the crowd!

Additionally, it’s a great way to show potential buyers what a home can look like with different interior design and decor choices. For example, you can stage the same space with different interior design styles like Scandinavian, Coastal, Industrial, Modern Style, and so on to appeal to a broader audience.

Also, virtual staging allows you to remove, redesign, and even virtually repair an existing interior or exterior image to bring out the home’s best features. 

You can remove that old sofa and get rid of personal photos and belongings to bring forth a clean and decluttered home or a patio that instead showcases a warm and welcoming fire in the fireplace to cuddle up next to.

Overall, it allows buyers to visualize themselves living in the home, which can lead to a faster sale and a higher price. 

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Virtual Staging Service

Interiors. Landscapes. Commercial. Virtually transform any space.

3. Sky Replacements 

A beautiful sky has a remarkable effect on prospective home buyers. Not only will your real estate images capture their attention for their beauty, but they’ll also be much more receptive to the property you’re selling. 

With a clear, bright, and welcoming sky, potential buyers are also more likely to spend longer looking at the image and imagining themselves living in the home.

Furthermore, a clear blue sky is a mood enhancer and will show off your listing in a whole new light, which can help you to sell it faster!

As a real estate photographer, you don’t have to worry about the weather or try to catch the perfect time of day for your shoot. You can simply replace the sky in the post-processing.

4. Grass Greening

Nothing is more welcoming and inviting than a full, green lawn outside of a home. A well-manicured, healthy lawn sends the right message about your property and immediately helps increase the curb appeal of any listing. 

But as real estate photographers, we are used to the challenges of taking pictures when shooting conditions don’t always cooperate. This means that occasionally you might find yourself in an environment with brown patches from inadequate rain or drought – not exactly ideal for showcasing a property! 

The good news is that technology has made it possible to adjust the color and make even parched lawns look lush and inviting, which will make your listing images pop.

5. Aerial Photo Editing

As a photographer, it is now more crucial than ever to be able to offer stunning real estate photography to capture the interest of potential homebuyers. And that’s where drone photography comes into the picture (*pun intended)!

Drones are equipped with onboard cameras, allowing them to capture images from high up in the sky or from far away. They are also able to use their rotors to hover in one place, allowing them to get a better viewpoint of the subject.

Aerial photography gives buyers a birds-eye view of the whole property and the surrounding neighborhood. It also allows for videos of the property, which gives potential buyers a better understanding of the size and layout of the property. 

But as with all real estate photography, even drone photos have to be edited to boost the overall quality and sharpness of the images. Professional drone editing can make an average aerial photo look impressive.

High-Quality & Consistent

Real Estate Photo Editing

Hire a dedicated editor with performance metrics from $7/hour.

Get Help From the Editing Experts at PhotoUp!

With experienced photo editing professionals on hand to help make your photos shine, creating stunning photos has never been easier! 

Whether you are looking for a one-time touch-up or a long-term service tailored to your needs, you can count on PhotoUp to deliver the highest-quality images.

With PhotoUp’s talented team of editors and a commitment to providing excellence at every step of the process, you can trust your images with us.

We can help with editing services like:

  • Image brightness and exposure correction 
  • Color and tone adjustments 
  • Window masking and glare reduction
  • Clutter and advanced object removal
  • Line and angle corrections
  • HDR editing 
  • Harsh shadows and lack of light 
  • Sky replacements and grass greening
  • Twilight and day-to-dusk editing
  • Drone editing
  • And much more!

On top of that, PhotoUp also offers a complete ecosystem of real estate marketing services such as:

Single Property Website by PhotoUp
Single Property Website by PhotoUp

Best of all, our easy-to-use platform allows you to quickly upload and get photos edited for all sorts of job demands. You can easily add instructions and provide feedback to ensure maximum image consistency.

PhotoUp Real Estate Photo Editing Uploader 

Have a look at our real estate photo editing uploader demo to see how easy it is to get started:

As simple as that!

Sign up for a free PhotoUp account today and get help creating listing images that will stand out from the competition!

Did we say that our photo editing starts at the low cost of $1.10 per image depending on your subscription?! And for a limited time, you’ll even get 10 free edits when signing up for an account!

We hope this blog post helped you realize the value of some more advanced real estate photo editing techniques that will make your listing images extra eye-catching. Before you go, you may also want to check out the following related resources:

Stina Pettersson

Professional Blogger

Stina is an entrepreneur, digital marketer, and professional blogger who's passionate about real estate photo editing, being outdoors with her pup, and sweaty gym sessions. She loves the written word and has been writing for publications like Forbes and Thrive Global. Originally from Sweden, she's called South Florida her home since 2013.

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