How to take your own professional real-estate photos with an iPhone ?

There are many reasons why people want to shoot their property photos by themselves, especially when mobile phones nowadays has become more and more advanced. Maybe you are in urgent need of photos to be put online for an ad campaign, or you simply want to cut cost and manage the property all by yourself. No matter what it is, Here are 5 tips to take property photos, with just an iPhone.

1. Shoot Raw and HDR

For all professional photography, almost half of the work goes to editing. Common JPEG fils are great for web sharing, however it is terrible at retaining informations for post production. When you see a real estate photo that looks bright inside and still a blue sky outside, those are 99% of the time due to the combination of raw image capturing and editing. The difference between shooting raw and JPEG can be huge depending on the lighting condition of the room you are shooting. For example, look at this room with a big window. Shooting raw(left) with post production(Right) will give you this look:

Most modern smart phones are capable of shooting raw, If you have an iPhone 12 or later, you can enable it in settings:

You can achieve this look using iPhones HDR function as well, Most smart phone nowadays should have this function built-in, with iPhone i will suggest you turning off the smart HDR option in camera settings and turn it on and off when you are shooting the photo :

If you don’t have an iPhone 12 or later, there are still plenty of third party apps that enables raw capturing. For example, Lightroom mobile offers raw capture within its app:

You might ask why do I still need to shoot raw if I can use HDR, well, the benefits of shooting in raw is way more than just having high dynamic range. The photos you take in raw is the original file similar to a negative in a film camera, meaning it is unprocessed and un-damaged, when you go in an editing software and start editing, you will find out it is much easier to save an over exposed or under exposed Raw picture than a JPEG. Apart from that, a raw photo usually looks smoother, more pleasing to the eye and often do not have that overly crisp look.

2. Choose the right time of day

Always shoot on bright days if you are using an iPhone, depending on the facing of the property, you will want to shoot when there’s most light in the house. Forget twilight/sunset photography with iPhone, due to technical limitations, a sensor that small is almost impossible to capture good twilight photography with no noise, even with long exposure.

When photographing a room with a bright window, always use HDR to make sure you retain the detail of both the sky and the interior of the room.

3. Use Grid to guide your composition

Composition is one of the key aspects in photography that definitely can NOT be saved by editing. Therefore it is essential you get it right before you click the shutter. First of all, turn on grid guide on your phone:

When taking the photograph, pay extra attention on the horizontal lines inside the frame, make sure the walls, the edge of the windows are all on the horizontal line of the grid. A good tip is to hold the phone a little lower than your chest or around the middle height of the room.

Don’t stress if it looks a little off, some minor error can be fixed later.

4. Use Wide angle lens (but don’t get too carried away)

If you use an iPhone 11 or later, you will have the ultra Wide angle lens. This is essential for real estate photography. For typical apartments, what standard camera lens can see is equivalent of what our eyes can focus on. A wide angle lens is capable of including all that peripheral vision that we see in real time, hence give you a complete scene of what the space feels like.

While most real estate photography features the property in wide angle lens only, if your apartment is well staged and have some unique architectural selling point, you should consider throwing in some standard or tighter shots to give it a little bit of that “magazine” feel. Maybe it is a high end kitchen finish, or an interesting curve along the wall. Shoot the best feature of your house which make it look more homie than just a bunch of wide angle shots.

5. Straighten the photos, adjust white balance and brightness in post.

Now you have taken some nice photos of your property, some of them looks good, but some of them might be too dark, or crooked a little, it is time to fix them in post. Don’t worry, I’m not going to teach you how to use a professional editing software, chances are if you are using an iPhone to take these photos, you’d expect some app inside your phone that does the job. Luckily enough, the built in editing function on the iPhone cameras can do a pretty good job.

Let’s assume you took a really quick shot and didn’t follow any lines on the grid, and it ends up looking like this:

open the photo on your iPhone and click the edit button on the top right of your screen and find the crop option on the bottom right of the screen.

This photo is perspectively distorted because I was shooting it pointing downward, by moving the vertical skew slider, you can easily make the photo look nicer. You might need to straighten it using the straighten tool if your shot is not straight horizontally.

Now lets look at how to edit the colour and lighting of a photo on your iPhone:

First go to the warmth slider to bring this photo a little bit “colder”, currently it is tinted a little towards the yellow side.

Next, go to the shadow slider and increase the brightness of the dark area :

The photo is now looking a bit flat, we can fix it by increasing the contrast, or increasing the blackpoint slider:

This photo is looking a little dark still, lets go to the brightness slider and increase it a little:

Now you have it, this is the before and after of our shot taken and edited on iPhone 12 pro:

Depend on your photos, you might need to tweak on other options a little, experiment on each of the options and see how your photos turn out to be, if you mess up you can always revert back to original and start again.

Conclusion

There you go, now you have finished this article, you can go out and start taking photos of your property with your smart phone now.

Although most modern smartphones are capable of doing all of the above, you should make sure that you have raw function and HDR available for tricky lighting conditions. Also make sure you shoot in the best natural light possible, use camera grid to guide your composition, and shoot both wide and standard focal length to bring out the space and the character of the property. Lastly, don’t forget to edit your photos, fix those crooked lines, dark shadows and brighten the picture, then you will have a set of stunning real estate photos taken by yourself with an iPhone.