How to keep the view in your window shots

If the home has a view, the view is often the most valuable thing in the listing. And in most agent-shot photos it is a white rectangle. This is the single most common technical flaw in listing photography, and it is entirely avoidable.

Why it happens

The camera has a fixed amount of dynamic range — the distance between the darkest and brightest thing it can record in one frame. Outdoors on a bright day is far past the top of that range when the camera is metering for an interior. Anything past the top records as pure white with nothing behind it.

The fix at the shoot

• Tap the window in your camera app, then drag exposure down until the view is visible
• Turn on every interior light so the room does not fall as far behind
• Shoot when the sun is not directly on that side of the house
• Keep HDR on so the phone brackets automatically
• Consider shooting the view-facing rooms at a different time of day than the rest

Sheer curtains are a legitimate tool

If the home has sheers, closing them cuts the outside brightness by a stop or two and turns the window into a soft light source rather than a hole in the frame. You lose the view, so use this only for windows where the view is not the selling point.

What can be recovered afterwards

A slightly hot window with faint detail can be pulled back. A pure white one cannot — there is nothing in the file to pull. The only honest option then is a reshoot, or accepting the white window. Replacing an unknown view with an invented one crosses from presentation into misrepresentation, and a buyer who drives out to see a view that does not exist will remember which agent listed it.

The sky above a house in an exterior shot is a different matter: a grey sky replaced with a blue one is a widely accepted presentation edit, because the house and its surroundings are unchanged and the weather is not a property feature. Even then, most MLS rules want digital alteration disclosed — check yours.