Real Estate Photography AI: The Rise of the Machines
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in real estate photography has already reached an advanced stage and plays a significant role in various aspects of design, photography, camera operation, image editing, and image creation. It is having a transformative impact and implications as it enhances efficiency, automates routine tasks, and offers intelligent recommendations. It is expanding creative possibilities. Currently human creativity, expertise, and decision-making remains an essential part of the process. Although there are indications this too may become redundant.
Certain fields of photography can’t be replaced by AI such as photojournalism, events, portrait work and real estate photography, due to the on location nature of the work. It will however increase efficiency and enable photographer to control more of the process of image creation and editing. Due to competitive forces fuelled by the efficiency of AI tools, turn around times will likely become tighter and client expectations higher.
Tasks like formulating the design brief will remain a human function while tasks involving concept generation and development can be assisted and stream lined using AI tools. It can assist generating design suggestions, creating layouts, and offering automated design solutions based on user inputs and design principles. It can also analyse user preferences and behaviour to personalise the design and editing process.
The Recent Past
Over the past decade real estate photography has been revolutionised by AI with features like autofocus, scene recognition, and image stabilisation. AI algorithms can analyse scenes, as seen through the lens and adjust camera settings for optimal results. AI-powered cameras can intelligently track subjects, detect and focus on faces, and automatically adjust exposure and white balance. Photographers can now capture sharper, better exposed images with ease. The latest cameras can be set to detect whether the subject is a bird, cat, dog, train, plane, car, boat or human and focus accordingly. Individuals can be auto detected within the frame so that the camera automatically focuses on them. For example a bride at her wedding.
AI Editing of Real Estate Photography
AI image editing tools can automatically enhance photos, remove objects, retouch portraits, deblur and apply artistic filters. AI can learn the editors style of colour editing. AI editing tools can be trained to adhere to an editors particular style. Photos can be auto culled based on AI derived or user stipulated criteria. For example photos with someone blinking can be auto deselected. If someone isn’t smiling their expression can be changed with Photoshop Neural Filters.
Editing processes that AI can assist with include:
- Cropping and straightening.
- Exposure
- White balance
- Fix focus.
- Relighting subjects.
- Dust spot removal.
- Add Atmosphere, haze and fog using an AI generated 3d depth map of image
- Remove and insert elements with Photoshops new generative fill, and the updated remove tool.
- Intuitive object removal tools
- Deep learning: Upload images to editing platforms so the AI can learn and replicate editing style in Lightroom.
AI features in Popular Software
Adobe Photoshop – Beta Version
- Content-aware fill.
- Intelligent upscaling.
- Automated object selection.
- Generative fill.
Generative fill is the latest AI tool added to Photoshop’s latest Beta version. It is a game changer for real estate photography. It is similar to content aware fill. Generative Fill is an AI-powered feature in Photoshop that enhances images with the help of text prompts. It can add, remove, or extend existing content. It can be used alongside every other editing tool to adjust AI additions, each generated nondestructively on a new layer.
Recent versions of Adobe’s Photoshop have also included Neural Filters that will especially appeal to portrait photographers. These are found in a new workspace in Adobe Photoshop with a library of filters that include:
- Skin Smoothing to touch up your subjects’ skin.
- Smart Portrait, which alters your subjects facial expressions.
- Make Up Transfer from a reference image.
- JPEG Artefacts Removal.
- Style Transfer, copying an image style from a reference image.
- Super Zoom helps compensate for the loss of resolution and increase detail and sharpness. Especially useful when upscaling images.
- Colorize old black and white photos.
Luminnar Neo:
- Manipulate and simulate light sources
- Stabilise your composition and Sharpen the image.
- Upscale
- Background Removal.
- Noiseless AI.
- High Dynamic Range image merging to reveal true colours.
- Focus Stacking. Keep everything in focus or adjust focus.
Topaz:
- Auto locates your subjects and identifies image quality defects.
- Corrects noise, blurring and lens distortions.
- Upsamples low-res images to higher resolutions.
Adobe Lightroom:
- New masking tools for selecting people and generating face, hair, eyes, lips and clothing masks.
- Content-aware object removal and scene replacement.
- Image enhancement .
- Denoise.
- Expanded Adaptive Presets.
- One-click Select Background.
- Adobe Lightroom also employs AI capabilities to assist with tasks such as automated photo organisation and intelligent keyword suggestions.
Skylum Luminar:
- AI Sky Enhancer.
- AI Structure for intelligent detail enhancement.
- AI Accent for automatic overall image adjustments.
Capture One Pro:
- Noise Reduction.
- Auto Adjustments to enhance image quality.
- Tools for automating the editing process.
Text-to-Image AI technology
Midjourney And DALL·E 2 are the most prominent solutions in this field. They rely on AI models like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that can generate entirely new and realistic images based on training data. Their assistance in creating concept art and visual prototypes is revolutionary. This technology has recently been incorporated into the latest Photoshop (Beta) in the form of the Generative Fill and remove tool features. Adobes new product Firefly works in much the same way as Midjourney And DALL·E 2, in terms of prompt generated images. However it relies on its library of stock images to draw artificial inspiration.
Midjourney Prompts
Examples of text that can be added to a prompt for controlling the generated output:
Increase the abstraction: –chaos 60
Resolution –quality 5, –hd
Aspect ratio –ar 4:3,–ar 3:2, –w 600 –h 300
Image as a prompt /imagine http://www.portraitofme.com/port321.jpg riding a motor bike.
Weights to Image prompt: –iw:4
Weights to text prompt green::2
Filtering out words from your image –no
Motor bike rider –no helmet
Photo realism prompts:
Include camera and lens settings in your Midjourney prompt:
-Shot on a Sony a1 camera with an 85mm lens at f/ 5. 8
Describe lighting style you would like applied in your Midjourney prompt:
Rembrandt lighting, broad, split, broad or short
Film Stocks. Imbue the characteristic of traditional film stocks by adding the following to your prompt:
- Provia – natural color reproduction with balanced contrast and saturation.
- Velvia – Vibrant and saturated colors
- Classic Chrome – vintage and nostalgic look of classic chrome films, delivering muted colors and gentle tonal transitions.
- Astia/Soft – Soft and subtle look with lower contrast and slightly muted colors, suitable for portraits and delicate scenes.
Impact of Artificial Intelligence have in regard to jobs and employment
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to have a significant impact on jobs and employment in various fields, including design, photography, camera operation, image editing, and image creation. Potential effects AI could have in these areas will be positive like the automation of routine and mundane tasks in design, photography, and image editing. The benefit of image enhancement, colour correction, and background removal will free up time for creative professionals to focus on creative pursuits.
AI-powered tools and software continue to enhance efficiency and productivity. AI algorithms can assist in image sorting, tagging, and organising, making it easier to manage large image libraries and find specific assets quickly.
It will increasingly supplement the process of generating ideas, suggesting compositions, and providing inspiration for design and photography projects. AI can analyse patterns and trends from vast datasets to offer novel approaches and assist in decision-making.
AI-based image editing software can automatically adjust and optimise images based on specific preferences or predefined styles. The streamlined editing process will allow photographers and editors to work to tighter deadlines.
AI currently automates certain tasks and augments human capabilities rather than replacing them entirely. Real estate photography professionals will need to develop new skills to work alongside AI technologies to avoid being replaced by them. The greatest benefit will come to those with an entrepreneurial mind set. Systems will be less labour intensive. Less human administration will be required. Time scales will be reduced and barriers to entry into traditionally sophisticated fields eradicated. New job roles and employment opportunities will emerge however clerical and process driven jobs will be in less demand. There will be new employment opportunities for AI specialists, data analysts, AI trainers, or professionals specialising in human-AI collaboration.
Ethical Considerations
As AI becomes more prevalent in image creation and manipulation, ethical concerns around authenticity, privacy, and responsible use of AI-generated content will need to be addressed by industry professionals and organisations. AI image creation tools currently search the internet for reference images. The resulting image created by these AI tools sometime partially retains the watermarks from the stock photo used to composite the images they return. Adobe address the issue of copyright by exclusively using the images from their own catalogue of stock images.
Overall, while AI may automate certain aspects of design, photography, camera operation, image editing, and image creation, it is expected to augment human capabilities, improve efficiency, and open up new avenues for creativity and innovation. Adaptation to AI technologies and the development of complementary skills will be crucial for professionals to thrive in this evolving landscape.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and copyright laws
Artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright laws in design, photography, and image creation pose unique challenges. Here’s a concise breakdown:
Determining copyright ownership is crucial when AI algorithms assist in creating content. AI-generated content resembling existing works raises infringement issues. Legal provisions to safeguard the original creators’ rights are inevitable. One inevitability may be AI tools that only use licensed content or enable users to obtain necessary permissions. Integrating mechanisms for legal compliance could well become a mandatory feature. However, AI can also aid in identifying unauthorised use by comparing content with copyrighted works. This will prove a bonanza to real estate photographers. They will be able to detect when there images are being used without their consent and report this to the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) as a breach of copywrite.
As Real Estate photography AI advances, copyright laws will need adjustments to address AI-generated content challenges. Balancing intellectual property protection and fostering innovation will be a challenge for this emergent technology. The legal landscape surrounding AI and copyright is intricate and largely untested. Jurisdictions may differ, and future court cases will shape regulation in creative AI pursuits.
In the future, Artificial Intelligence is projected to foster collaboration between humans and AI. It will automate routine tasks, provide intelligent assistance, enhance image editing, personalise user experiences, and offer data-driven insights.
One possible future is that the cost benefits of Real Estate photography AI will undercut authentic human content. Disincentivising creative innovation resulting in humans making less new art and content. However, AI image generators can also drastically improve creative content development. It can also cut through and automatically analyse large amounts of information from various sources by filtering, grouping and prioritising. It can help photographers identify associations between seemingly unconnected data. It is becoming a valuable tool for finding inspiration by generating mood boards and style guides based on prompts and keywords.