How is Real Estate Photography Done?
Mastering real estate photography settings is essential for creating images that attract potential buyers. Effective real estate photography demands more than just a professional camera—it requires technical skill, proper lighting techniques, and precise post-processing. This guide breaks down the key steps, covering camera settings, tool, HDR and flash techniques, and advanced editing in Lightroom and Photoshop, all while focusing on the best real estate photography settings for stunning results.
1. Essential Real Estate Photography Settings
To capture professional-quality images, mastering your camera’s settings is crucial. Manual mode gives full control over aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. Although for speed on the job these settings can be saved as a custom mode on professional level cameras.
- Aperture (f/7.1 to f/11): Ensures a large depth of field, keeping both foreground and background sharp.
- ISO (100 – 400): Keeps noise levels low, maintaining image clarity.
- Shutter Speed: Often set slower indoors to let in more light but must be stabilized with a tripod.
- White Balance: Use custom or auto white balance to avoid color casts from mixed lighting sources.
These real estate photography settings allow consistent results, especially in indoor spaces where lighting conditions can vary drastically. A wide-angle lens (12-24mm) is recommended for capturing the full scope of rooms without distortion. Consequently due to high megapixels these can be reframed while retaining sharpness.
Here at Nathan James Photography and Videography we use the Sony A74, 33 megapixel full frame camera. Excellent in low light. This is matched with the 12-24 mm f4 lens. Perfect for real estate photography and videography. Wide enough to capture everything. Also in our kit is the 24-70mm f2.8, 50mm f1.2 GM and the 70-200mm f2.8. We can capture small, medium and large rooms in exquisite detail, and distant views and life style shots.
We also bring, as a back up, the Fuji XT4 paired with a Zero distortion, 9mm, f2.8 lens.
2. Bracketed Shots and HDR Photography
Exposure bracketing is a technique where the camera captures multiple exposures of the same scene at varying levels—underexposed, overexposed, and correctly exposed. This ensures all areas of the room, from shadows to bright windows, are captured in detail.
Setting Up Auto-Exposure Bracketing (AEB):
- Enable AEB mode to take three to five shots per scene with different exposure values (e.g., -2, 0, +2 EV).
- Keep the camera stable using a tripod to ensure proper alignment for merging the images.
The resulting images are merged into an HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo, ensuring a balanced exposure across the entire scene. HDR is particularly useful in real estate photography settings where windows often cause overexposure while interiors remain too dark.
3. Using Flash to Overcome Lighting Challenges
Relying solely on natural light can lead to color and brightness inconsistencies. Introducing flash photography resolves these issues by filling in shadows and creating even lighting across rooms. However, balancing ambient light with flash requires skill.
Flash Tips for Real Estate Photography:
- Use off-camera flashes with triggers to control light direction and minimize reflections.
- Aim flash units at walls or ceilings to create bounce lighting and reduce harsh shadows.
- Avoid pointing flashes at reflective surfaces like windows and mirrors to prevent glare.
Flambient photography—a blend of flash and ambient light—offers the best of both worlds. One frame captures the room with natural light, and another uses flash to illuminate dark areas. These images are later merged for a seamless final result.
4. Circular Polarizing Filter. The Overlooked Essential Tool.
Using a circular polarizing filter in real estate photography settings offers numerous benefits, particularly for managing glare and enhancing colors. First and foremost, a polarizing filter reduces glare on reflective surfaces. Therefore it is invaluable when photographing interiors with polished floors, reflective walls, or swimming pools. By rotating the filter, you can selectively eliminate harsh reflections that distract from the natural appearance of the space, creating cleaner, more professional images that showcase true details and textures. This reduction in glare also allows viewers to see the room’s finishes and lighting more clearly, enhancing its appeal in listings.
Additionally, a polarizing filter enables precise control over the hue of the sky in outdoor shots, a valuable tool for exterior real estate photography. By adjusting the filter, photographers can deepen blue skies and make clouds pop, adding contrast and vibrancy to the property’s surroundings. This enhanced color contrast helps the property stand out, especially when shooting in bright daylight. For real estate photography, where every visual detail contributes to the buyer’s perception, these adjustments create a more inviting and polished presentation of the property.
Effective glare reduction is not merely an aesthetic choice; it’s a prerequisite for professional-grade real estate photos. Unwanted reflections can obscure key features of a room or even misrepresent the property’s appearance. Polarizing filters are an essential tool in real estate photography settings, as they provide the control needed to capture spaces accurately and compellingly, directly in-camera without requiring extensive post-processing.
5. Editing Real Estate Photos: Lightroom and Photoshop Techniques
Post-processing is essential for refining images and blending multiple exposures. Using Lightroom and Photoshop ensures you achieve consistent color balance, sharpness, and exposure across all shots.
Step-by-Step Editing in Lightroom:
- Import bracketed images and group them by capture time for easy management.
- Use Photo Merge > HDR to combine exposures. Check the Auto Align option to correct any shifts.
- Adjust exposure, shadows, and highlights to ensure even lighting.
- Correct lens distortion and straighten vertical lines to maintain architectural accuracy.
Advanced Exposure Blending in Photoshop:
- Open HDR-merged images as layers in Photoshop. Or merge them in Photoshop using luminance masks.
- Use layer masks to reveal the best parts from each exposure. For example, keep the well-lit interior from the flash shot and the clear window view from the ambient shot.
- Apply luminosity blending modes to maintain accurate colors while merging flash and ambient frames.
- Use the clone tool to remove unwanted reflections or artifacts.
By combining Lightroom’s batch-editing tools and Photoshop’s detailed blending capabilities, you can create polished, high-quality images ready for real estate listings.
6. Solving Common Challenges in Real Estate Photography
Managing Window Exposures
Capturing clear views through windows while maintaining indoor exposure is one of the biggest challenges. To solve this, take a separate exposure for the window view and blend it with the interior shot using Photoshop’s layer masks.
Handling Mixed Lighting
Rooms often contain different light sources, such as daylight from windows and artificial indoor lighting, resulting in color casts. Use white balance adjustments in Lightroom to correct these discrepancies.
Minimizing Reflections
Reflections from flash units or light sources can detract from the photo’s quality. Avoid placing flash units directly in front of windows or mirrors and use bounce techniques to diffuse the light effectively.
Perfecting Real Estate Photography Settings for Success
Optimizing your real estate photography settings is key to capturing beautiful, market-ready images. With the right camera settings, flash techniques, and HDR blending, photographers can produce high-quality photos that stand out in competitive real estate markets. Each component—whether it’s using AEB for bracketing or mastering post-processing in Lightroom and Photoshop—plays a role in creating compelling visuals that drive buyer interest.
By paying attention to both in-camera techniques and post-processing workflows, photographers can overcome common challenges and produce consistent results. The importance of real estate photography settings cannot be overstated, as they ensure every shot looks professional, polished, and ready to convert listings into sales.