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> make products look bigger than they really are, especially in online photos I've noticed that tiny condos and apartments in real estate photos look enormous.

> make products look bigger than they really are, especially in online photos I've noticed that tiny condos and apartments in real estate photos look enormous. I'm undecided on whether this is a deliberate attempt to mislead or an artifact of having to use a wide angle lens to capture the whole room (but an artifact that the seller and real estate agent like).

tenpies 5y ago
Deliberate and a well known practice. Sometimes it's done poorly and leads to hilariously bad photos (e.g. a fridge as wide as a 72 inch TV).
alchemism 5y ago
They are deliberate in that they know how to take a photograph which maximizes the attractiveness of a space. The same tradition occurs in filling the written description of a place with no amenities. “Walking distance to schools & churches” is a popular filler. Τhe facility could be 50 feet away or it could be a 5 mile walk; anything short of walking alongside the freeway is fair game to describe in this fashion.
- roel_v 5y ago
  "Τhe facility could be 50 feet away or it could be a 5 mile walk" Realtor associations at least in the Netherlands have guidelines (e.g. on what distances amounts to 'walkable') that prevent this sort of thing, I see no reaons our country would be unique; that said, do you have any specific examples of ads like this? It's not that I'm that fond of realtors, but some of the over the top claims in this thread are really exaggerations. Will you find examples of exaggerated claims? Of course. The question is, is it 'common'? I'd say no.
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    Of course, in the Netherlands you'd just say "cyclable", and almost everything in almost every city is.
  - alchemism 5y ago
    I would clarify that it is common in the US. Every state has an association but they are ‘lightly’ regulated at best. [Edit: except in the area of racial discrimination — the Federal government is keen to prevent realtors from racial profiling, and with good cause.] My father worked as a realtor for some years so he taught me how to parse listings (and photographs) for the reality behind them.
- lowercased 5y ago
  "Walking distance to schools" seems very at odd with the 'helicopter parent / pre-arrange play-dates / driving kids everywhere all the time' style of child rearing I see with many of my peers. The notion of being within walking distance to a school and actually have the kid walk... seems antiquated. I did it, in the 70s and 80s, but it seems to be a thing of the past in many areas.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >but it seems to be a thing of the past in many areas. Varies greatly by income (which is why HN thinks it's extinct).
  - patrickthebold 5y ago
    Parents walk with their kids. It's still nice to walk and not have to drive.
  - weeblewobble 5y ago
    I happen to live within a few blocks of two elementary schools (one public, one private) in urban Seattle. Tons and tons of kids walk to and from school in groups without parents. Every day at 2:30 or whatever the streets around my house are filled with kids laughing and playing and doing kid stuff. Not a parent in sight. Sometimes a narrative is just that.
function_seven 5y ago
Real estate photos are so bad. When I sold my last house, I almost regretted it when I got the listing photos back. I never knew I lived in such a clean and enormous house! Three things: 1. I get that interior shots need a wide angle to capture the boundaries of a room in a single photo. But there's a limit. Most pictures I see dial it up to those crazy levels where obviously square or circular items become rectangles and ovals. Here are 2 images I just now randomly picked: This kitchen is long! https://i.imgur.com/YxrRMSy.jpg https://i.imgur.com/YxrRMSy.jpg Nope, just small: https://i.imgur.com/rPCSMUT.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rPCSMUT.jpg (But, the rise of 3D walkthroughs is a good antidote for this, so credit where it's due on that front.) 2. Saturation! Please, stop maxing out that slider. Sometimes it's just vivid blue sky and greenest green grass, but other times they go so far that the highlights are all blown out and everything just looks weird. 3. Fake fireplace fires, sunny weather, etc. A lot of photos have a fake sunny sky inserted into window openings, or a "fire" in the fireplace that's obviously been pasted in. Different random listing shows 2 photos with incredible luck—the flames are identical. https://i.imgur.com/jhnwvAv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jhnwvAv.jpg and https://i.imgur.com/Ut1aTdl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Ut1aTdl.jpg
- nprateem 5y ago
  The easiest trick is to blast a flash off white ceilings which then makes any other white walls look bright and clean
- AuryGlenz 5y ago
  There’s actually a good reason for photoshopping in a fire in the fireplace. When doing real estate photography you generally want to do something to ensure that the windows aren’t overexposed and blown out. The two options are to light the interior with some flashes to balance the exposure (the better way), or use multiple exposures and do HDR. If you use flashes, the fire will be too dark and won’t really show in the exposure. Moving flames will also screw up HDR. I still think it’s stupid and only did it once at a realtor’s request.
- uncomputation 5y ago
  I can confirm real estate agents in the Bay Area are notorious for the first one you listed. They can make a shoebox look like a palace.
AuryGlenz 5y ago
It’s a bit of both. I’ve done some real estate photography, and realtors get stupid excited about ultra wide angle shots. Me? I tried to stay as tight as I could. I think it looks…classier? One other thing to keep in mind is that lenses aren’t especially cheap, and in this case you’d rather have too wide of a lens rather than something too tight, so people might go for the 16mm instead of the 20mm. If you’re doing it right (most don’t) you should be using a tilt-shift lens, and they’re usually $2,500+. Anything is better than realtor cell phone pictures. I had a couple hire me independently because their realtor just quickly bopped around their house taking pictures on her phone…vertically. Yeah.
- alanbernstein 5y ago
  Why are tilt shift lenses right for this?
  - aembleton 5y ago
    You can capture more of the room without the fish eye distortion.
  - AuryGlenz 5y ago
    You want to keep "verticals," as in walls, straight - but usually you'd rather show more of the floor than the ceiling. Being able to shift the lens up or down while keeping it level lets you do this. You can just tilt the camera and fix the verticals in post, but then your composition will be thrown off as some of the image will need to be cropped.
- zo1 5y ago
  Another one that's even worse than cell-phone pictures: Scans of pictures in newspaper listings!
- nybble41 5y ago
  > One other thing to keep in mind is that lenses aren’t especially cheap, and in this case you’d rather have too wide of a lens rather than something too tight, so people might go for the 16mm instead of the 20mm. If that's the issue then you can shoot the image with the 16mm and then crop to get exactly the same image (other than resolution) as you would have shot with the 20mm lens. For example, here[0] I have an image shot with a Samyang 14mm rectilinear lens, distortion-corrected and exported to JPG with UFraw. I then loaded that image into Hugin, set the input crop factor to 1 (full frame), and re-exported with a 84x61.9 degree field of view based on some online FOV tables[2] for a 20mm lens in a full-frame camera. As you can see, the resulting image[1] is what you would expect from a 20mm rectilinear lens. Hugin can also translate from a fisheye lens to rectilinear if that is the type of lens you happened to have on hand. The trade-off is that you're losing some resolution, but you would usually be downscaling from the raw image anyway for the online listings. [0] https://imgur.com/d0SumPb https://imgur.com/d0SumPb [1] https://imgur.com/gbz6mys https://imgur.com/gbz6mys [2] https://www.nikonians.org/reviews/fov-tables https://www.nikonians.org/reviews/fov-tables
emodendroket 5y ago
Well, if everyone else is doing it, you're kind of forced to do the same.
- norov 5y ago
  Explain the companies that choose not to do it.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Who are you referring to?
rapjr9 5y ago
Manipulated photos to make products look smaller or larger than they really are everywhere on eBay. You have to find the dimensions of the product to find out how big it really is. The use of small/large people and small/large hands is widely abused to affect perception of product size as well.

tenpies 5y ago

Deliberate and a well known practice. Sometimes it's done poorly and leads to hilariously bad photos (e.g. a fridge as wide as a 72 inch TV).

alchemism 5y ago

They are deliberate in that they know how to take a photograph which maximizes the attractiveness of a space. The same tradition occurs in filling the written description of a place with no amenities. “Walking distance to schools & churches” is a popular filler. Τhe facility could be 50 feet away or it could be a 5 mile walk; anything short of walking alongside the freeway is fair game to describe in this fashion.

roel_v 5y ago
"Τhe facility could be 50 feet away or it could be a 5 mile walk" Realtor associations at least in the Netherlands have guidelines (e.g. on what distances amounts to 'walkable') that prevent this sort of thing, I see no reaons our country would be unique; that said, do you have any specific examples of ads like this? It's not that I'm that fond of realtors, but some of the over the top claims in this thread are really exaggerations. Will you find examples of exaggerated claims? Of course. The question is, is it 'common'? I'd say no.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  Of course, in the Netherlands you'd just say "cyclable", and almost everything in almost every city is.
- alchemism 5y ago
  I would clarify that it is common in the US. Every state has an association but they are ‘lightly’ regulated at best. [Edit: except in the area of racial discrimination — the Federal government is keen to prevent realtors from racial profiling, and with good cause.] My father worked as a realtor for some years so he taught me how to parse listings (and photographs) for the reality behind them.
lowercased 5y ago
"Walking distance to schools" seems very at odd with the 'helicopter parent / pre-arrange play-dates / driving kids everywhere all the time' style of child rearing I see with many of my peers. The notion of being within walking distance to a school and actually have the kid walk... seems antiquated. I did it, in the 70s and 80s, but it seems to be a thing of the past in many areas.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >but it seems to be a thing of the past in many areas. Varies greatly by income (which is why HN thinks it's extinct).
- patrickthebold 5y ago
  Parents walk with their kids. It's still nice to walk and not have to drive.
- weeblewobble 5y ago
  I happen to live within a few blocks of two elementary schools (one public, one private) in urban Seattle. Tons and tons of kids walk to and from school in groups without parents. Every day at 2:30 or whatever the streets around my house are filled with kids laughing and playing and doing kid stuff. Not a parent in sight. Sometimes a narrative is just that.

function_seven 5y ago

Real estate photos are so bad. When I sold my last house, I almost regretted it when I got the listing photos back. I never knew I lived in such a clean and enormous house! Three things: 1. I get that interior shots need a wide angle to capture the boundaries of a room in a single photo. But there's a limit. Most pictures I see dial it up to those crazy levels where obviously square or circular items become rectangles and ovals. Here are 2 images I just now randomly picked: This kitchen is long! https://i.imgur.com/YxrRMSy.jpg https://i.imgur.com/YxrRMSy.jpg Nope, just small: https://i.imgur.com/rPCSMUT.jpg https://i.imgur.com/rPCSMUT.jpg (But, the rise of 3D walkthroughs is a good antidote for this, so credit where it's due on that front.) 2. Saturation! Please, stop maxing out that slider. Sometimes it's just vivid blue sky and greenest green grass, but other times they go so far that the highlights are all blown out and everything just looks weird. 3. Fake fireplace fires, sunny weather, etc. A lot of photos have a fake sunny sky inserted into window openings, or a "fire" in the fireplace that's obviously been pasted in. Different random listing shows 2 photos with incredible luck—the flames are identical. https://i.imgur.com/jhnwvAv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jhnwvAv.jpg and https://i.imgur.com/Ut1aTdl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Ut1aTdl.jpg

nprateem 5y ago
The easiest trick is to blast a flash off white ceilings which then makes any other white walls look bright and clean
AuryGlenz 5y ago
There’s actually a good reason for photoshopping in a fire in the fireplace. When doing real estate photography you generally want to do something to ensure that the windows aren’t overexposed and blown out. The two options are to light the interior with some flashes to balance the exposure (the better way), or use multiple exposures and do HDR. If you use flashes, the fire will be too dark and won’t really show in the exposure. Moving flames will also screw up HDR. I still think it’s stupid and only did it once at a realtor’s request.
uncomputation 5y ago
I can confirm real estate agents in the Bay Area are notorious for the first one you listed. They can make a shoebox look like a palace.

AuryGlenz 5y ago

It’s a bit of both. I’ve done some real estate photography, and realtors get stupid excited about ultra wide angle shots. Me? I tried to stay as tight as I could. I think it looks…classier? One other thing to keep in mind is that lenses aren’t especially cheap, and in this case you’d rather have too wide of a lens rather than something too tight, so people might go for the 16mm instead of the 20mm. If you’re doing it right (most don’t) you should be using a tilt-shift lens, and they’re usually $2,500+. Anything is better than realtor cell phone pictures. I had a couple hire me independently because their realtor just quickly bopped around their house taking pictures on her phone…vertically. Yeah.

alanbernstein 5y ago
Why are tilt shift lenses right for this?
- aembleton 5y ago
  You can capture more of the room without the fish eye distortion.
- AuryGlenz 5y ago
  You want to keep "verticals," as in walls, straight - but usually you'd rather show more of the floor than the ceiling. Being able to shift the lens up or down while keeping it level lets you do this. You can just tilt the camera and fix the verticals in post, but then your composition will be thrown off as some of the image will need to be cropped.
zo1 5y ago
Another one that's even worse than cell-phone pictures: Scans of pictures in newspaper listings!
nybble41 5y ago
> One other thing to keep in mind is that lenses aren’t especially cheap, and in this case you’d rather have too wide of a lens rather than something too tight, so people might go for the 16mm instead of the 20mm. If that's the issue then you can shoot the image with the 16mm and then crop to get exactly the same image (other than resolution) as you would have shot with the 20mm lens. For example, here[0] I have an image shot with a Samyang 14mm rectilinear lens, distortion-corrected and exported to JPG with UFraw. I then loaded that image into Hugin, set the input crop factor to 1 (full frame), and re-exported with a 84x61.9 degree field of view based on some online FOV tables[2] for a 20mm lens in a full-frame camera. As you can see, the resulting image[1] is what you would expect from a 20mm rectilinear lens. Hugin can also translate from a fisheye lens to rectilinear if that is the type of lens you happened to have on hand. The trade-off is that you're losing some resolution, but you would usually be downscaling from the raw image anyway for the online listings. [0] https://imgur.com/d0SumPb https://imgur.com/d0SumPb [1] https://imgur.com/gbz6mys https://imgur.com/gbz6mys [2] https://www.nikonians.org/reviews/fov-tables https://www.nikonians.org/reviews/fov-tables

emodendroket 5y ago

Well, if everyone else is doing it, you're kind of forced to do the same.

norov 5y ago
Explain the companies that choose not to do it.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Who are you referring to?

rapjr9 5y ago

Manipulated photos to make products look smaller or larger than they really are everywhere on eBay. You have to find the dimensions of the product to find out how big it really is. The use of small/large people and small/large hands is widely abused to affect perception of product size as well.