Top 5 Issues With Real Estate Photos Part 4 - Print vs Web Issues

Real Estate Photography Tips for Realtors listing.jpg

This issue is probably the most contentious for most graphic designers/printers, as photographers properly expose in their cameras and calibrate to their own monitors and screens in post processing. The problem is that for MLS or web photos that is excellent but for print makes the images too dark on output on even the whitest of stock paper. Printing depending on the printer and calibration is always going to darken images by about 15% so your whites will be grey, your light greys will be medium greys, and so forth and you will lose all the detail in the shadows. Reason for this is your screen has light emitting through it even through blacks whereas paper does not emit light and depending on the stock you use will only darken this effect more depending on the shade of the stock and the mixed lighting environment it is viewed in. Newsprint is not only grey but it also absorbs ink because of the softer grain which creates an out of focus muddy look, so the darker the image the worse the effect. From a printers perspective the quickest way to correct this is with global adjustments on sets of images. As photographers and designers know global adjustments like that never produce a happy medium, better to locally adjust each image to get the desired result so that your hard earned images look stellar on all mediums especially in print which is the most costly of the mediums your images will be used on.

You should aim for images that are a quarter to half a stop brighter on screen by exposing to the right (ETTR) without blowing out the highlights, that way your clients get exceptional results and can heap praise and refer you to others, their Graphic Designer too will love you.

*Calibration is dependent on the accuracy of the equipment used by both yourself and the printer you deal with. In our case we calibrate our monitors and printers with X-rite i1 Pro Spectrophotometer and have balanced levels in-house and consistent external printer results. Check with your print provider or marketing departments to see a sample to evaluate your calibration in comparison.

* Our opinions are based on what we see come through our workstations, this is a generalized view of the local Toronto real estate market and is not exhaustive even to the local area.