CreateHDR: Online site to Create High Dynamic Range images

HDR (High Dynamic Range) images try to highlight every spot in a photo and make it stand out.  Usually to create a HDR image you need Photoshop or a similar desktop application.  CreateHDR.com allows you to upload images from your desktop or Flickr account and create a HDR image from one photo.  Typically HDR images are created from multiple images with different exposure settings.  Currently the site only allows for the JPEG file format to be uploaded.  There is a pro version under construction on the site that will allow for multiple exposure uploads and different file formats.

Not every photo that is uploaded looks good after it has gone through the process.  There is only so much manipulation you can do to a single upload to make it look like a HDR photo.  Take a look at their public gallery and judge for yourself.  I am looking forward to seeing the Pro Version.  I would bookmark this site to watch for further development.

Video Interview with Jeff Harris, General Manager of PropertyPreviews.com

Jeff Harris, General Manager of PropertyPreviews.com, gives a brief overview of PropertyPreviews.com, and chats about the value of using social media on the Web to market real estate. The video is hosted by Joe Zekas on NewHomeNotebook.ning.com.

See Jeff’s interview here.

You can find many more videos at NewHomeNotebook.

RED: The Revolution the Camera Industry Needs

If you a serious photographic prosumer and contemplating getting a new DSLR and a HD camcorder, consider waiting for the RED Digital Cinema DSMC (Digital Stills and Motion Camera) scheduled for release in early 2009.  Earlier this year Nikon and Canon released DSLR’s that were capable of recording in HD (Nikon D90 and Canon EOS 5d Mark II).  While both these cameras are excellent for still photography, their HD recording capabilities are not enough to be considered a camcorder replacement.

On November 13, 2008, Red announced the Scarlet and EPIC lines.  Basically the Scarlet and the Epic are the Brain of the camera from which you can build upon your setup.  If you want to have more of a DSLR or camcorder experience, the choice is yours to do either or both.  There are over 2,251,799,813,685,248 configurations as of today.  Think of it as the Lego project, build it to fit your needs.  All the parts are interchangeable.  If you need to upgrade the Brain (which is the processor) in a few years, the rest of your camera is still useable with your new upgrade.  If you select the S35 Brain, you can also use Nikon or Canon Mount lenses.  If Nikon and Canon mounts are a must, the S35 Brain is pricey at $7000.  If not, there are less expensive models.  Comparatively, if you looked at the cost of separately buying a DSLR and a HD camcorder, the cost for the RED is not out of line, plus you have the ability to incrementally upgrade.   RED has Scarlet Brains (processors) currently at $2500 to $12000.   There will also be a fixed 8X Scarlet Brain under $2500.

The good news for consumers is RED is going to do to the camera industry what Apple did to the cell phone industry with the iPhone.  This radical innovation is going to drive manufacturers to offer similar options to their camera lines and hopefully get to a point where the camera product is not obsolete after 18 months.  For now the average consumer will see no change, but the changes should start trickling down into the consumer camera equipment in the next year or two.  At the rate technology changes,  this is the camera revolution I have been waiting for.  Only one question remains for me…….How do I convince my wife?

iPhone/Android Versions of our blog

Do you use an iPhone, or one of the new Android-based phones?  We here at PP HQ are fans of these nifty devices, and are happy to let like-minded users of these phones in on a cool feature of this blog.   By bookmarking our blog page, when you visit our blog on your phone, you’ll automatically see something like what’s shown on the right.

No iTunes application store mess, just point and browse.

Kudos to our social media masters who got this going.   Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Using Facebook Targeted Ads to Better Market Your Business

Facebook’s ad targeting system is among the best targeting system out there in terms of deliverability and cost effectiveness.  Through Facebook Pages, Real Estate professionals can directly market to their target demographic by placing ads within their prospective client’s Facebook interface.  With 80% of home buying interest today starting online, it would seem reasonable to make an effort to get to the word out on your property through a platform that has become respected among all social circles and walks of life.  It is for this reason that Facebook is the reasonable choice above other social networks.

Though Facebook is technically the second largest social networking site with 100 million active users (News Corporation’s MySpace still holds the first place title), it has become the cleaner alternative to the corporate-backed, ad-ridden, unprofessional landscape of MySpace.  This puts Facebook in a position to learn from MySpace’s mistakes – let everyone market on the platform instead of just larger companies.
Everyone from photographers to real estate professionals to vendors have started to use Facebook’s easy-to-use ad developer to place ads directly into a desired user’s homepage.

The site allows for advance targeting – target by age, gender, location, interests, whatever you want.  It also allows for you to attach friend-to-friend interactions about your ads; friends of the target will show up as referring your business to them through your ad, which helps attract attention and credibility.
Facebook is also flexible on how your purchase ads.  Their system allows for both CPC (purchase clicks) or CPM (purchase impressions) styles of payment.  Their CPC method allows you to bid on a cost-per-click, with the higher the bid equaling more impressions on the site.  They also let you set a limit per day on each ad, allowing you to increase and decrease the ad rate according to your budget.

A great feature of this ad system is Facebook’s “trusted referral” option.

From Facebook.com: “The ads can also be shown to users whose friends have recently engaged with your Facebook Page or engaged with your application. Facebook Ads are more likely to influence users when they appear next to a story about a friend’s interaction with your business.”

This is great if you want to start building within a network of friends who have shared interests.  So say you’re a photographer and you have a business selling real estate photography.  If you tell your clients to become fans of your business on Facebook, you can advertise directly to their associates, using your clients as referrals.
The end result of these targeted ads is delivering your message directly onto a prospect’s facebook homepage, which means (depending on your bidding settings) that your prospects can see your ad every time they refresh their homepage.  This is a great way to advertise yourself as a professional in your field.

Facebook Advertising Info

Free Online Photo Editor-FotoFlexer

The standard for photo editing still remains Adobe Photoshop.  However, using Photoshop does require a learning curve to use and it is expensive.  Photoshop elements $99 & Photoshop CS3 $999.  My favorite webapp for editing photos is FotoFlexer and it is FREE!!!.

FotoFlexer is a free online we application that allows you to upload images from you computer or other online photo applications like (Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket, and more)  to FotoFlex for editing.  There are no programs to buy and no subscribtions costs.  The user interface is easy to navigate.  Once your photo is uploaded there are options to crop, resize, add text, and many more.  What is also an advantage is you are able to save the file as a jpeg or png back to any destination you choose. (Desktop, Facebook, etc.)  Give it a try, I think you will find it useful for when you need a quick photo modification.

Remember to subscribe to our RSS feed or email updates to get all of our latest posts.  Happy Selling!!

PropertyPreviews-10 tips to improve your photos in 10 posts: Tip #1

One of the main categories we want to explore in the PropertyPreviews blog is to help Real Estate professionals show their listing in the best possible way. We want your prospects to want to see your listing in person.  In the next 10 photography blog posts we will give you tips you can use today to produce engaging photos.

Tip #1:  Prepping the house just before you are ready to shoot. I know there may be some listings where there is just no hope in making it look appealing. However, in this tip I’m not asking you to clean and rearrange the whole house.  It is up to you to explain to your clients your expectations before you arrive at their home to take photos.  There are a couple small prepping changes that go a long way to make the home look more appealing.  First, go throughout the home and turn on all the lights possible.  A well lit house is always going to look more appealing in a picture.  The second easy home prep tip is to remove all trash cans from the view of the camera.  Garbage is never an eye appealing item, and can make a kitchen look dirty at a brief glance.  Thirdly, put all toilet seat lids down.  Bathroom shots are hard enough, an exposed toilet seat is not going to make the picture look any better.  These may seem like small tasks, but we see many pictures that come into PropertyPreviews.com that could use these tips to make their free video look even better.

Remember to subscribe to our RSS feed or email updates to get all of our latest posts.  Happy Selling!!

Whiz Bang! Great technology enhances video creation

We love that you love how easy PropertyPreviews.com is to create free real estate video.   There’s a way to make it even easier.   Perhaps you’ve seen references to Eye-Fi on our site, and paid it no attention.

For those of you who make frequent use of PropertyPreviews, and we know there’s a lot of you, this is something you may want to learn more about.

What if you could take pictures of a house, then stop at McDonalds for a bite to eat, and when you got home, all your photos were in your PropertyPreviews account waiting for you.   That’s right.  You NEVER connected your camera or memory card to your computer.   In fact, they’d also be waiting for you on your computer as well.   Sound impressive?  It is!  That’s what an Eye-Fi card does.  If you have a camera that uses an SD memory card, you can replace it with an Eye-Fi card, and all this magic can happen.

Here’s what’s happening.  The Eye-Fi card not only is a 2 GB memory card that stores your pictures, it’s also a wireless transmitter that will send your photos over the Internet to your computer and to PropertyPreviews, all via your pre-designated wireless network (like home or office network).   Some versions of the card come with one-year free Wayport Hot Spot access, which allows you to transmit at some public hot-spots, such as McDonalds.   Once configured, when you’re camera is on in range of one of these pre-selected networks, it automatically uploads photos.

I’ve personally used it, and there’s even more whiz-bang stuff, like geo-coding where the photo was taken.  That means, in addition to storing data like shutter speed, and date/time taken, it can also approximate the latitude and longitude of where it was taken.  This allows you to map the location of it on a map like Google Maps.   This feature is not available on all Eye-Fi models.

For those of you that like focusing your time on buyers, sellers and prospects, and not on labor-intensive marketing (hey, isn’t that why you use PropertyPreviews.com in the first place?), then consider adding an Eye-Fi card to your tool bag.   Once you try it, we think you’ll be as impressed as we are.  PropertyPreviews is proud to be the first real estate partner of Eye-Fi, and we think you’ll be excited when you learn what it can do.   Others think it’s impressive as well.  Eye-Fi has garnered numerous awards, including PC World’s “The 100 Best Products of 2008″ and Yahoo! Tech’s “Last Gadget Standing 2008.”

Learn more by clicking here.

If you’ve tried it, let us know by leaving a comment below.

New Media Partners

We’ve been working hard here at PropertyPreviews.com HQ to bring you more media partners for you to promote your listings, and we have some coming up soon we know you’ll appreciate.  Stay tuned for more details.

To know when these partners are added, you’re free to return to the blog, or you can join our Facebook group, our LinkedIn group, or subscribe to our RSS feed of blog posts, so the new information will get to you right away.   Click here to get started with any of these groups

Letter from Jeff Harris - General Manager of PropertyPreviews.com

Letter from Jeff Harris, General Manager of PropertyPreviews.com

Hello from PropertyPreviews.com Headquarters!

By now, thousands of real estate professionals have seen the many advantages of using our free online service.  I hope we’ve answered the one question on everyone’s mind, but just in case – PropertyPreviews is still a free video creation service, and will always be free!

I want  to share some updates that we’ve just launched on PropertyPreviews.com.  We’ve listened to your suggestions, and we’ve implemented several new upgrades to our site including:

•    The ability to create a new video by adding or deleting photos in the video
•    The ability to delete a listing/video if you no longer want this to appear on your dashboard
•    Enhancements to our photo upload tool – including a gauge that lets you know the quality of the photos you are loading
•    More options for property descriptions – to use in your ePostcard or for flyers and postcards you may want to order
•    Enhancements to our marketplace – including a new subscription-based Enhanced Listings product for ChicagoTribune.com – only $50/month for all of your listings

We’re also excited to announce the launch of our official PropertyPreviews Blog – a site dedicated to helping real estate professionals gain knowledge on anything from new technologies that can help sell properties to prominent market news.  We hope you’ll check it out.

I hope you’ve been following our progress so far.  Join our Facebook group or page to stay up-to-date on all PropertyPreviews news.  Or check out our BlogRoll for a complete list of our social media presence.

Feel free to contact me at jharris@propertypreviews.com.

Best,

Jeff  Harris

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