How Your Home’s Lighting Affects Your Real Estate Photos

You’ve prepared the whole room. Now you want the colors of the stone, furniture, and flooring to show properly in the photos.

I have worked with a number of the most successful real estate agents in Southern California, and among the things they do that are really important, apart from pricing the house correctly, is to get the home ready so that it is move-in ready before the photo session.

I have never gone into the homes of some of the best realtors I've worked with and found them messy or cluttered with children's things. On the contrary, they dispatch a team weeks before the property is even photographed and get the house ready. They hire contractors and take away all the trash. In the case of some more expensive properties, they go so far as to move the people who live in the house so that it becomes empty.

Now everything is done, and you want to take photos of it.

It's similar to a car: you've started the engine and all the basic work is completed, and now you're applying the metallic paint, the final details. When you take a photograph of that car, you want the paint to be visible. Likewise with a house—you've carried out all the work and now it's important that the colors appear correctly in the photos.

One very important factor is the color of the light

Many agents enjoy fitting yellow lights into the house, since these yellow lights give you a great deal of color cast.

Suppose that you have some plants, pottery, or other very fine architectural features which are not yellow, and your cabinetry is also not yellow; but now these lights are causing a yellow tint to cover everything.

Getting rid of the color tints from the cabinetry is a nuisance. We are able to take out the yellow, but if we remove too much then the other colors in the picture are harmed and the photograph doesn't appear as elegant. We often turn those lights off instead.

That is the kind of thing we have to deal with in real estate photography. Even if the entire house has been prepared, the lighting causes the colors to appear different from the way they really are.

Can a colored light eliminate another color?

The wood has its own warmth. When we correct the lighting, we don’t want to take that color out along with the color cast.

It is important since it provides a reason why we cannot simply fix all the issues afterward.

Suppose there is a green object in the room and the only light falling on it is nearly pure red. In that case, if the green object reflects very little red, it will appear very dark. There is not enough green light getting to it so that it can reflect some back to the camera. The red light has not canceled out the green; it is simply the case that the light necessary to make the green visible is absent. Adding red light to daylight does not get rid of the green light that is already present. That is the fundamental science of how light and the colors of surfaces interact.

A warm-white bulb in a house is not the same as a pure red or yellow one since it does not automatically eliminate a specific color. Nevertheless, the light it gives influences the way the camera records the colors in the room. Even if two bulbs appear to be the same white they can make the colors look different. NIST explains this difference here.

Yes, it is possible to correct a color cast. But if the light never provided us with the information necessary for showing a color correctly, we couldn't reliably recover that information simply by editing.

With daylight passing through the windows and yellow lights inside, different sections of the room require separate adjustments. A single adjustment applied to the entire photograph won't correct both of them. This is a well-known issue when photography involves mixed lighting.

The second important factor is how bright the light is

At times we enter a room where there is a very bright bulb with no diffuser; this results in a total mess when one is attempting to take photos since some areas of the room appear extremely bright while other areas appear extremely dark.

When we are making an HDR picture, we take a number of different exposures so as to capture both the bright and the dark areas, but this does not affect where the light is going; if a light is causing one part of the room to be bright while leaving another part dark, we still have to cope with that.

Suppose that you have rather little daylight—for instance, you have small windows in an old house in Pasadena.

When it's twelve o'clock and I switch on those lights, I expect them to illuminate the room evenly. If there is very little daylight, the lights inside may then have to do more to light the room. However, I don't want one light to dominate everything and cause different colors to spread around the house.

What I'm looking for is something that appears neutral and which will match the existing daylight. The aim is to achieve an even photograph regarding both lighting and color, and that is also the objective when we use a flash, even though a normal household bulb won't provide the same level of control.

We need soft light during the shoot

The light must be soft, not so harsh as to produce bright spots that are distracting everywhere.

You may notice, when you look at a photograph of a house, that there are long, star-shaped streaks around the lights. These streaks are mainly caused by the way light bends as it goes around the opening in the lens. Leaving the shutter open for a longer time makes the streaks more obvious, but that by itself does not produce the star shape. There's a scientific study on this effect here.

One reason why I don't want there to be a very strong and direct light in the center of the photograph is that a shade or a diffuser can help to reduce the distraction caused by the light, even if it doesn't ensure that all the streaks vanish.

The description of 'soft white' on the package refers to the color of the light, not necessarily to the softness of the light in the photograph.

If there are strong colors in the room, those matter too

You can still have color in a child’s room. A soft pink or blue gives you that color without taking over everything else in the photo.

We enter houses which have walls that are red, extremely bright pink, or green, and these colors can also be picked up by other areas of the room.

What I want in terms of photography when you've already started painting the house is something soft and neutral; if you have children and wish for pink or blue in their rooms, then a soft, neutral pink or blue is the kind I would prefer to photograph.

You can still include color; I only don't want that color dominating all the other elements in the photograph.

Check the lights before the photoshoot

I really do suggest that you check the light bulbs whenever you're putting a house on the market or preparing to sell it.

When you go to Home Depot, your local supermarket or a home improvement store to buy a few bulbs, start by checking how much light the room actually requires. Avoid buying a bulb that will be too bright for the room and don't select one that will shine directly onto a single spot.

If you want to know how bright a light is, you should consider the number of lumens. Watts indicate the amount of electricity that the bulb consumes, not the amount of light it emits. For more information about these labels, the FTC provides an explanation here.

In the room look for a white light which is not too yellow or too blue; avoid using something that is too warm and don't combine it with a much cooler light since the cooler light may appear blue in the photograph when the camera is balanced for the warmer areas of the house.

The kind of bulb you need will depend on the room in question. Just ask us before you replace all of them.

You have already sent the contractors, taken away the trash, and got the house ready. Now we are going to come in and take the photos. Make sure the lighting is checked before the shooting so that we can photograph the colors you really have, rather than spending the entire time struggling with the colors produced by the lights.