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PhotoPerfect is a camera and photo-editing app that allows real estate agents to automatically fix lighting issues in their listing photos.
Platforms: iOS; Android coming soon
Ideal for: All agents.
Top selling points
- Automates process of exposure blending
- In-app mass texting
- Easy slide show creation with video
- Multiple settings to adjust interior lighting
Top concerns
No camera app can make you a better photographer.
What you should know
Camera apps are incredibly diverse, ranging from those designed to make pre-teen Instagrammers look like creepy animated puppies to professional-grade options that can emulate DSLR quality output.
PhotoPerfect’s intent is to help make your listing photos better, not put dog ears on your bio pic, so it has that going for it.
The app’s stated selling point is its use of a technology best described as a type of exposure fusion, a process that can be done in PhotoShop, but only after you’ve sorted through a few tutorials on how to use PhotoShop.
With PhotoPerfect, bright sun glaring from outside of bay windows is made to look calm and blue, and shadows, insider or out, can be automatically lightened up.
Ultimately, I struggle with the notion of having to pay for something that can be largely accomplished by waiting to take photos at the right time of day (morning or early evening) and touching them up with native camera filters.
Additionally, it’s amazing what five minutes of rearranging some furniture — or having a BoxBrownie account — can do for a room’s appearance on Zillow.
The team at PhotoPerfect stresses that its product can help agents save hundreds by not hiring a professional photographer.
However, for luxury listings, or properties at the top end of an agent’s average price range, no app should serve as a substitute for the skills of an actual photographer.
In short, I’m not impressed by the before-and-after quality of the app’s images. Can the app improve a bad photo? Sure. But it pre-supposes the original is taken in the worst possible conditions.
If you have no other choice but to capture a property when its dark, and the sellers won’t cooperate with timing, then PhotoPerfect would be worth having on your home screen, at least until you upgrade to a multicamera phone that can accurately capture objects shrouded in shadow.
What I like best about this app is its peripheral functionality and how that can be used in other ways.
Thus, instead of relying on the app for your primary listing photos, use it send buyers a music-backed slideshow of a previewed listing.
PhotoPerfect’s PhotoShow feature makes it easy to select images, record an intro video, choose a music theme and hit send.
It pulls in contacts from your phone’s address book, and also enables list creation. Buyer contacts can be grouped by ZIP code or budget, for example. That’s handy, especially if your CRM app syncs contact interaction with your phone’s address book. The app doesn’t have any native open rate tracking.
The app can also link to a hosted slide show on an MLS listing page. Users need only tap the green share icon to upload it to their servers.
The yellow share icon launches the text distribution.
Overall, using the app is pretty straightforward, nothing is hard to figure out.
Like your phone’s camera app, it too has a number of filters and adjustment tools, and its proprietary settings are designed around fixing the ramifications of poor lighting situations, such as a sunny or cloudy days and indoor lighting constraints. You can also rely on its automatic adjustments.
But again, I don’t think you’ll look at the after without wondering if you could arrive at the same result on your own. If you’re someone who doesn’t enjoy that aspect of your job, then maybe a photo app like this can relieve you of that burden.
We’re in the age of highly affordable digital staging, 24-hour turn-around twilight editing and apps for 3D walk-throughs.
My concern with PhotoPerfect is that it’s not offering enough, especially in light of what else agents can choose from today.
Still, its rating on the App Store, out of 28 in total, is just under five stars. It should be available for Android in the next couple of weeks.
PhotoPerfect costs $1 per month or $29.99 for a lifetime subscription.
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
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