House.jpg - Tips For Better Looking Pictures

The Picture Is Very Important!  A good picture will increase the likelihood that a shopper arranges to see a property.  Although a lousy picture is usually better than no picture at all, getting good pictures posted promptly to your web site will speed the sale of a home.  This is what we are doing at HAR.com.

Here are some simple things that you can do to improve how your listings look on the Internet to a home shopper:

Lower resolutions work better on the Internet – Set your camera to take low-resolution pictures.  The new digital cameras are almost too good for taking pictures of homes.  This is because most of the new cameras take images at high resolution, while the Internet is optimized to deliver lower resolution images.

Resolution and Pixels – A digital image is made-up of thousands or millions of little bits of color arranged in a rectangular pattern.  The little bits of color are called “picture elements” or “pixels” for short.  A low-resolution pictures has relatively few pixels, so it looks fuzzy and diagonal lines have a jagged appearance.  A high-resolution image has over 1 million pixels (a mega pixel) and is much clearer and the diagonal lines are smooth, not jagged.

256 x 200 is the HAR.com standard – These images are 256 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall (256 x 200).  It is a nice picture and it downloads quickly over most Internet connections.  If done incorrectly, the conversion of a picture for display on your site can result in a lousy image that looks like your Grandmother’s “cross-stitching”, unless you follow some simple guidelines.

LQ is OK - Most cameras have a “low-quality” (LQ) mode that produces 640 x 480 images.  This is more than enough resolution for your site and preparing simple flyers.  Unless you are planning on a rather sophisticated publishing effort, leave the camera set on LQ.

HQ is Too Much – Cameras with a “high-quality” (HQ) setting take pictures that are 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024 or maybe even higher.  These pictures are publication quality because you achieve results comparable to what you would get using a film camera.  But, HQ images are too big for shoppers to download over the Internet.  Both Interealty’s StellarView and the HAR Photo Manager.com will automatically reduce the file size of these very large images, but the results may be a very low quality.  To get the best results, either shoot with your camera set to LQ or learn to use a simple image processing software package.

Most cameras come with software that allows you to edit images and adjust their quality and resolution.  Most image processing packages support four common operations that make pictures look better:

 “Crop” your pictures – Trim away the superfluous parts of the image, leaving a well-framed picture of the  home.  We’ve all seen too many pictures where the house looks lost in the distance and the photo is dominated by driveway, lawn and sky

The “Resize” Option – This function actually lowers the resolution of the image.  Reduce the size of the image to 256 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall for a perfect fit on your site.  Although the HAR Photo Manager will do this automatically, you might get better results and be able to preview the results by doing it with your own software.

“Instant Fix” – There are many complex parameters that can be adjusted to improve the quality of an image.  Many software packages have an automated feature that automatically “fixes” an image by adjusting the contrast, brightness, color balance and other variables.  The resulting image may be greatly improved

“Brightness” – Even after using the “instant fix” command you may still have a problem with lighting.  If the home was poorly lit or the house was in a shadow, you may need to increase the “brightness” to make the features of the home more discernable.  Be careful and don’t overdo it, but if the image still looks dark, you may need to further adjust it.

There are several popular software packages available.  I usually use the “Camedia” software that came with my Olympus camera.  Adobe also produces several good software packages ranging from the basic “PhotoDeluxe” to a professional product called “Photoshop”.  If you are just trying to post pictures to your web site and generate some basic property flyers, these Adobe products might be overly complex.  LView-Pro is a popular image processing package that is actually quite powerful and can be purchased for $50 over the internet by visiting www.Lview.com. 

If you process over a dozen pictures at a time and you do this frequently, then you may want to look into a package called “Thumbsplus”.  It can automate the process and deal with pictures in large batches.  You can learn more about this package at www.thumbsplus.com.

At HAR.com, the new “HAR Photo Manager” and the “Photo Gallery” have proven to be very popular tools.  But the results will only be as good as the pictures you load.