Personally I'm tired of the HDR-ification of everything. House listings? It's like realtors figured out what HDR was and went NUTS. Those images are like the comic sans of photography.
I've seen them add light fixtures to photos. Like, the light fixtures do not exist in the actual house. Not a lamp, something connected to the house. The way they're going, that industry's gonna get a regulatory smack-down at some point.
Here in New York I've seen listings use extremely bright, daylight-emulating lights to make rooms appear "sun-drenched" when their only window faces another building, and remain dim year-round.
I even saw this on a video walkthrough of an apartment – they clearly had placed the lights right outside the window.
We sold a place last year. The agent asked whether we wanted to pay for rental furniture or virtual furniture for the pics. We said neither.
We ended up with the virtual furniture for free. I think they wanted to figure out how it works and our place was small and boxy so an easy starting point.
Not that you could trust the ultrawide angle HDR photos much in the first place, now you have to put up with shoddily inserted virtual furniture wrecking your size/perspective references. It is an Alice in Wonderland trip...
I recently saw a listing where badly inserted trees and piles of rocks were littered around the back yard, maybe to hide crap the owner hadn't bothered to clean up? Not sure, but it was obvious.
It's even better when they throw on HDR for one of those faux Mediterranean houses built with the fit and finish of an Olive Garden. It's like a tell to stay away, someone who worshiped Camilla Soprano's kitchen once owned this home.
That, and the "realtor lens". Driveways suddenly become 50% longer. TVs are 3 meters long and .75 meters tall. That bedroom looks like a long, narrow jail cell (well, not in real life; such is the unintended consequence of misrepresentation). We all know what you're doing, few (if any) are fooled, just take the shot as it is or just leave it out, since that photo might as well be a picture of the Eiffel Tower for all of its lack of usefulness in representing the house.
Going to respectfully disagree, though maybe we are referring to different images. When I look at images on Redfin, it's clear someone either used HDR or manually edited in the scenes outside the window. To me, this looks like what my eyes would see when in the room vs what the camera itself would show which would either be blown out views outside the windows or the room too dark.
Most real estate photographers use HDR, and the higher end uses off-camera flash (as did I). There’s no nefarious reason behind this - it’s because photos where you can actually see out the windows look better. It’s also more like what your eyes would see rather than a crazy blown out white rectangle. When the house is on a lake you want people to see what the view is like. It was the rooms where I didn’t do that where I was hiding something, like an air conditioning unit being all you could see or whatnot.
The stupidly wide lenses most use? Yeah, that‘s deceptive. I also think it looks bad I tried to ride the line on using the tightest lens I could while still showing the room.
>To me, this looks like what my eyes would see when in the room vs what the camera itself would show which would either be blown out views outside the windows or the room too dark.
Honestly it's hard to tell without a reference picture. Looking at the first picture, it seems reasonable that the living room would be well lit because of huge windows. However, the section with the tall houseplants look nearly as bright as the open living room area, which seems doubtful.
The first picture where the walls are bright white would have the windows look like a bright glowing rectangle vs. being able to see the outdoors through the window if they didn't use HDR. They overexposed the interior a little bit, which means the outdoors would especially look like bright white rectangles. Even when you have a lot of windows the indoors is significantly dimmer than the outdoors on sunny days unless the room is a greenhouse.
They did the HDR so well that you couldn't tell it was HDR. Artificial HDR is a choice, just like natural HDR is in that photo.
In pictures 8 and 9 they didn't HDR, so the windows look like white rectangles and very overexposed. In picture 17 they did the HDR treatment on the horizontal windows, but did not on the skylights. Those skylights should show up as blue vs. white rectangles if they were doing the HDR treatment on the entire photo, etc.
I think they also use off camera flash and bounced it off the ceiling, which is why I think it looks kind of glowy-white with all the white walls and floors in that place.
> or manually edited in the scenes outside the window
This is definitely a thing. A lot of real estate photos are manipulated to replace the content of copyrighted photos and paintings, to hide unsightly views through windows, or to show clear skies when the photographs were taken on a rainy day.
That's how HDR was originally. Everyone used it to the Xtreme++!! Everything looked post-apocolyptic instead of just rolling the highlights back to proper exposure and pulling details out of the shadows. It's perfectly fine to shoot HDR without going nuts, but very few people choose to do it that way.
Probably shouldn't call it shooting HDR (even though they do it) - you're doing the exact opposite, you're converting HDR into SDR and so it looks overly tone mapped as as a result.
A proper HDR photo should blind you when viewed on an HDR display, which are kinda expensive when they're desktop sized.
