Real Estate Compositing

Selecting and Compositing Photographs for a Real Estate Project

Sometimes, when working to make images for real estate, I find myself working under a very limited time budget for on site work. In other words, there is a small window of time to be in the property and the shoot must progress quickly. This is when I will lean on an abbreviated lighting kit and favor compositing in post production to help make up for lack of time on site.

This video shows the images I capture photographing a room where there is limited opportunity to hide lights, and limited time to nit pick over lighting placement. There is also a sped up version at 10X speed with a generic audio backing track for anyone who just wants to get an idea without a deep dive.

I start in Lightroom, first sorting the images we want to keep to use as our composite ingredients. Then I correct color and exposure while also toning the image slightly. Once the images are selected and processed, I open them as layers in Photoshop and use the auto-align feature to get the overlay lined up exactly.

Using a variety of masks and selections, and a little judgement, I then paint in areas of light that I want to keep and paint out areas I want hidden. Areas like where you can see lights in the frame. They are placed with the intent of lighting only specific sections of the scene and are intended to be removed in the final edit, as is demonstrated in the video.

After adding an image to the tv screen to reduce the dominance of the big black box, I send the shot back to Lightroom for final color toning, sharpening, and export.

Because of the video and voice-over, this image takes around an hour to complete, but in a normal scenario where I am not trying to divide my attention, the process is much faster. Considering that I was in this room from setup to tear down for a total of 20 minutes, this adds up to be a great approach for moving quickly on location while keeping post production manageable.