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Comment by alister | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

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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

Nope, just small: 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 and https://i.imgur.com/Ut1aTdl.jpg

The easiest trick is to blast a flash off white ceilings which then makes any other white walls look bright and clean

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.

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.

I have been house shopping for about a year now (with no real urgency) and ALL real estate agents will do this. We saw a house where a real estate agent only used their cellphone for photos and the house had the lowest number of views. We went to see the house and it was a m a z i n g. You may joke about these photos, but people want to imagine the room. When you have spent some time looking at houses, your brain is able to convert from the wide angle deception to what it should probably look like.

My in-laws put their house on the market, and the Real Estate agent produced a walk-through video.

My wife and I couldn't stop laughing because the agent photoshopped a view into the kitchen window, but even in the context of the video it's clearly a plane with a texture on it just outside the window. It looks like a low-res poster of the Himalayas hung outside their kitchen window; it's not a convincing fake view in the slightest.

Don't know what the agent was thinking, the actual view out the window is better than that.

> Different random listing shows 2 photos with incredible luck—the flames are identical.

Ah yes, the old roaring fire directly below a window :)

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.

Why are tilt shift lenses right for this?

You can capture more of the room without the fish eye distortion.

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.

Another one that's even worse than cell-phone pictures: Scans of pictures in newspaper listings!

> 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

[1] https://imgur.com/gbz6mys

[2] https://www.nikonians.org/reviews/fov-tables

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.

"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.

Of course, in the Netherlands you'd just say "cyclable", and almost everything in almost every city is.

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.

"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.

>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).

Parents walk with their kids. It's still nice to walk and not have to drive.

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.

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).

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

Explain the companies that choose not to do it.

Who are you referring to?

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.

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