Client Profile.
The real estate photography and videography company helps clients across USA to maintain their digital catalogs and brochures for enhanced brand credibility. The company was seeking image editing experts to post-process 3000+ real estate photographs daily.
Business Need.
The real estate photography company had 20+ photographers onboard to capture photographs for its digital catalogs and brochures. Despite the best equipment and skills, the photographs required editing and retouching to make them print ready. Lack of lighting, unwanted clutter, saturated colors, and harsh shadows were some of the imperfections that needed to be worked upon, and involved a series of processes including:
- Virtual staging
- Light and Color temperature adjustment
- Merging bracketed exposures
- Managing natural look of edited images
- Saturation and hue management
- Resizing property images as per digital catalog specifications
The company approached HitechDigital to get real estate property images edited and retouched without disturbing the signature style of the real estate photographer.
Challenges.
An initial scope of work assessment highlighted the huge volumes of photographs that needed to be edited on a daily basis. A structured and tightly designed work flow was needed to ensure that no image editor spent more than allotted time to edit any one image.
Following project requirements increased the challenges of the process:
- Navigating the subjectivity element in sorting and selecting only eight images per property to be edited from thousands of images received, based on defined criteria.
- Editing/retouching images without disturbing the signature style of the real estate photographer.
- Managing the 12-hour delivery cycle to edit and send 3000+ property images daily.
- Identify, flag and skip images tagged by client– not to be edited.
- Having on board image editors with expertise and experience in editing both residential and commercial property images.
Solution.
Designed and implemented a process workflow for ongoing post processing HD quality property images using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. The automated image editing workflow ensured that edited images upon reaching the final lag, would trigger an alert and get automatically assigned to a multi-layered quality check process.
Approach.
Manual approach to receive, classify, select and edit real estate images could prove time consuming, error-prone and not the most cost-efficient way to handle the project. So, the image editing specialists at HitechDigital designed and deployed a seamless and automated photo post-processing workflow.
Execution:
- Rules-driven workflow supported the integration of emails and FTP folder to receive bulk property images in JPEG and various other formats.
- Programmable bots and scripts were used to classify images in a pre-defined sequence like residential and commercial; further segregated into architectural and interior segments and assigned to experts for editing and retouching.
- Assigning of images to the designated image editor depending on image complexity and expertise.
- Image editor identifies and documents the kind and amount of editing required for image based on pre-defined rules.
- Edit the property image according to parameters defined in scope of work.
Quality Check and Audit:
- Separate team of experienced real estate image editors was deployed to qualify post-processed images to be sent to the client.
- Alerts/notifications for unedited/inadequately edited images were generated with ML backed algorithms.
Dispatch:
- Edited real estate images, in line with the catalog requirements, automatically uploaded to client FTP in JPEG form.
- Software and Technology: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Light room, Custom tools and technologies
