If you want to sell your house yourself,you have to attract a good number of people to look at it.
One way is to prepare a number of flyers attached to a for sale sign on the front lawn.
On it are the basic room features, lot size, asking price and a nice photo of the front of the house.
If this portrait of you home is enticing enough, prospective buyers will want to see the rest of the house.
So you borrowed your brother's expensive digital camera and got a pretty good shot of the exterior.
But when you view it on your computer monitor you see that the house looks tilted, dark (it's a white house) and the lawn looks dead.
There are ways to fix these problems and more.
Ethically, it's not wrong because in the spring, the lawn will look pretty good and if you get up at dawn, you will see the house front in the sunshine.
The first chore is to lighten the shadowed front so that the white house looks white.
You do this by masking the darkened areas including the house and clicking on the brightness and contrast (higher) boxes.
Remove the mask and smooth any edges that show.
The sky area can be masked and darkened one step.
Place a very light blue and a darker sky blue in the color boxes.
The magic mask will choose the white of the sky, then use the paint can to blend the two blues (lighter blue on the bottom) into the sky area.
The tilted or perspective distortion can be corrected in Adobe Image Ready or Google Picasa.
If the shrubs need trimming, apply the clone brush (60 per cent) in an adjacent area to clean up the stray shoots.
If there are empty areas in the shrub, fill in the holes with the clone brush.
Choose a clear area of lawn and clone it horizontally to the browned areasDo not work vertically.
A fifty per cent transparency works well.
Hopefully, you have no people or vehicles in the shot but if you do, you can try to clone them out or as a last resort, crop the picture.
You may decide to take a new picture without the vehicles.
See my article, "When Your House Says, 'Cheese'.
One way is to prepare a number of flyers attached to a for sale sign on the front lawn.
On it are the basic room features, lot size, asking price and a nice photo of the front of the house.
If this portrait of you home is enticing enough, prospective buyers will want to see the rest of the house.
So you borrowed your brother's expensive digital camera and got a pretty good shot of the exterior.
But when you view it on your computer monitor you see that the house looks tilted, dark (it's a white house) and the lawn looks dead.
There are ways to fix these problems and more.
Ethically, it's not wrong because in the spring, the lawn will look pretty good and if you get up at dawn, you will see the house front in the sunshine.
The first chore is to lighten the shadowed front so that the white house looks white.
You do this by masking the darkened areas including the house and clicking on the brightness and contrast (higher) boxes.
Remove the mask and smooth any edges that show.
The sky area can be masked and darkened one step.
Place a very light blue and a darker sky blue in the color boxes.
The magic mask will choose the white of the sky, then use the paint can to blend the two blues (lighter blue on the bottom) into the sky area.
The tilted or perspective distortion can be corrected in Adobe Image Ready or Google Picasa.
If the shrubs need trimming, apply the clone brush (60 per cent) in an adjacent area to clean up the stray shoots.
If there are empty areas in the shrub, fill in the holes with the clone brush.
Choose a clear area of lawn and clone it horizontally to the browned areasDo not work vertically.
A fifty per cent transparency works well.
Hopefully, you have no people or vehicles in the shot but if you do, you can try to clone them out or as a last resort, crop the picture.
You may decide to take a new picture without the vehicles.
See my article, "When Your House Says, 'Cheese'.