We hired a professional real estate photographer to come in and take photos in different locations. I stood right next to the real estate photographer to capture what I thought was the same image.

So the professional editors have increased the saturation of the trees, they’ve increased the saturation of blue sky and given that appearance that it’s a lot sunnier and more vibrant than it actually is. The other thing that you notice is that it appears to be photoshopped in the fact that there are no leaves in the bottom of the pool anymore, and that definitely makes it feel a lot more inviting.

The room definitely doesn’t feel as open and as vast as it does with the real estate photographer’s photo, and that’s because they’ve used a wide angle lens. This is something they would generally do in smaller houses to create a feeling of space. It includes all the edges, the chairs, the shelves, the plants, and instantly you feel like the room is double the size. The other thing that they do in this image is add a fire. So, as you can see in my image, they’re was definitely not a roaring fire going on at that point, but they add this in in order to showcase that warmth, and that feeling of sort of being snugly and cosy in the lounge room.

The perspective makes you feel like you’re walking into something a lot grander than you actually are. The actual hallway into the bathroom is really narrow, but you can’t see that within this image because of the perspective that they’ve taken. The other thing you notice right away is how bright it looks. It feels sunny, it feels warm, it feels really inviting, but the original image that you can see it’s actually quite a dark room.

So another thing that they tend to paint in, similar to the fireplace, is that they will add in bits of grass to lawn where there is none. And so the whole image just looks really bright; it looks like there is grass all up the driveway when we know there actually isn’t, and they’ve really increased the colour saturation, so the greens look punchy, the sky looks punchy, even the fence looks a lot brighter than it actually is.