I’ve been using the new Photoshop Express beta that Michael Price did a post on earlier and wanted to do a follow up post to Michael’s.

First of all I want to say that I think Photoshop Express is a really slick app that has a ton of cool features. However, I want to consider Photoshop Express specifically from the point of view of real estate photography. To do that, I’ll use the photo above, an actual photo from the NWMLS taken by a Realtor friend of mine (who will remain unnamed).

This photo has four classic things that need photo-editing:

1. The curved door frame needs to be straightened. These curved lines are called barrel distortion and is frequently present in varying degrees in photos taken with wide-angle zoom lenses.
2. Once the curve is removed the door frame lines are not vertical. We need to make the door frame parallel to the edge of the photo. Verticals that are not vertical is actually one of the biggest problems with real estate photos. I did a post back in August on this subject.
3. The interior of this little dining room has an orange color cast that needs to be removed.
4. The interior of the dining room can use some increase in brightness.

Photoshop Express can currently fix 3 and 4 but not 1 and 2. This is typical of most light-weight web based photo editors like Picasa and Picnik.

For Realtors or someone doing photo editing of real estate photos I think the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 (now available for PC and Mac) is still the best value for the money. It will fix all four problems with the photo above.