Corrections
Six things we do to a photograph, and the price each one has
Every correction takes something as well as giving something: straightening costs picture area, opening shadows costs a little contrast, reducing speckle costs a little texture. None of them changes the room. Here is each of them with both sides written down.
Walls put back upright and the horizon put back level.
Perspective and levelling
A phone held at chest height and tilted back throws the verticals together, so a room reads as though it were leaning away from the camera. The frame is rotated and the convergence taken out until door frames, window reveals and wall corners stand upright, and the floor line runs level.
Straightening costs picture area: what rotates out of the frame is gone, and a very steep tilt cannot be recovered without cropping into the room. This is the first thing we check and the first thing we tell you.
The dark end of the room opened up, the window held back.
Exposure and contrast
Point a phone at a room with a bright window in it and the camera protects the window, leaving the floor, the far corner and anything under a worktop in shadow. Shadows are lifted and the brightest areas pulled back until the whole room can be read at once, without the flat grey look that comes of doing too much of it.
Nothing is painted in. Where a highlight has gone completely white or a shadow completely black, the file holds no detail to bring back, and we say which frames those are before quoting.
One neutral for the whole room, not one per light source.
White balance and colour
Tungsten bulbs, LED panels, daylight through glass and a lit screen each pull the colour a different way, and a white wall shows every one of them. Neutral is set from something in the room that ought to be neutral, and mixed lighting is evened out so the same wall is the same colour across the frame.
The colours in the room are not replaced with better ones. A magnolia wall stays magnolia and grey flooring stays grey.
Speckle out of the shadows, edges left alone.
Noise and detail
In a dim room the camera raises its sensitivity and the shadows break up into coloured speckle, which is the first thing that makes a photograph look like a snapshot. The speckle is reduced while the edges that carry the room - tile joints, skirting, the weave of a fabric - are kept.
Smoothing stops well short of the point where texture turns to plastic. A grainy frame reduced too far looks worse than the grain did.
Rooms photographed at different times, brought to one appearance.
One look across a set
A set is looked at as a set. Brightness, contrast and colour are matched from frame to frame so that moving through the photographs reads as moving through the premises, rather than as four separate visits on four different afternoons.
Matching works within what the frames hold. A room shot at dusk and the same room shot at noon can be brought closer together, not made identical.
Framing tidied, files written out in the sizes you need.
Cropping and export
Edges are squared up, the crop is closed on whatever the straightening left ragged, and the finished frames are written out in the formats and pixel sizes you ask for - one set for a website, another for a listing portal, another for print, from the same corrected file.
A crop can only take away. If a listing needs more of the room in frame than the original holds, that frame has to be taken again.
Before you send anything
The frames decide what is possible, not the editing
A photograph taken level, on the main lens, with the filters off, corrects further than one taken at an angle through a digital zoom - and no amount of work afterwards closes that gap. Every set is opened and looked at frame by frame before a quotation is written, and you are told which frames are limited and why.
If a frame cannot be brought to a usable state, we say so and it is left out of the quotation rather than charged for and returned disappointing.
What to send with them
- Which rooms the frames belong to.
- Anything that has to stay readable in the picture.
- The sizes and formats the finished files are for.
- Whether the ultra-wide lens was used.
Or write to work@photokova.com