You can do a lot of things in Photoshop and you can make a gray day look a lot more colorful with a few easy tricks:

Use the polygonal lasso tool and select the sky. You don't have to be 100% precise with your selection because we will only replace whites so a few bushes will not spoil the results. Different story if there would be a white car or any other white object in your photo.

Ok, so you got the sky selected. What you want to do now is click the adjustment layer icon (Red Arrow). This will pop up a menu and you will have to click on selective color in that menu.

Now change Colors to Whites and play with the settings to get to a result that will satisfy you. I wanted to create the look of a sky you get just before a big storm hit because there is still enough light to make all the other colors look believable and not too fake. There is a few other things I have done. I made the house color a little bit lighter and brighter, cleaned up the bottom of the pool and removed the cleaner and also enhanced colors of the plants.

All in all a good result I think and maybe this helps you when you have to shoot on a gray day like this and the exterior photos look anything but great when you get them out of your camera.

No need to worry because there is always Photoshop and this once more proofs my 20/80 theory.

The better your equipment the better the photo the camera spits out will look like but it's still a long way from being perfect. In my opinion the photo shooting is 20% of the job. If I am at the house for 1 hour I will spend at least another 4 hours processing the photos. When shooting I don't just walk in there and take a single flashed photo of every room. I carefully look at the room and make sure everything is in it's place. Curtains, pillows, lamps, everything. Find the best angle for the shoot, setup the tripod, take the photo. That is 20% of the job. Sure you need a bit of experience and a routine for it, but there really is not much too it. No rocket science required. My seven year old twins could do that.

Now comes the rest. The 80% that make all the difference. Stuff the amateur and the real estate guy can not do and that is why you do the job. Here is where skills kick in and you need to know how things are done and you need to do them good. In my opinion photography is overrated and a real estate photo guy with a camera in his hand thinking he is an artist puts a smile on my face. A real estate photographer does as much art as a plumber fixing a pipe. Same thing for wedding photography, same thing for any other 20th century photography.

You think you are an artist, you are not even 20% of that but you can go home and make your work shine with a computer and you can turn whatever your camera has seen into art. Todays photography art is done at home on the computer and not at the time the photo was taken. 80% Photoshop is what makes the difference, believe it or not.

Why pay more, well you will find out the hard way because if you are serious about what you are doing you will never settle for second best. You will constantly upgrading your equipment until you have the best available. So why not start with the best available at the time instead? Like in the above example, sure that Sigma will do the job and will get some photos out of your camera and if you are not shooting with a great camera like a D700 or D3 you may not even notice a big difference at the start. Then you find out what barrel distortion is and what makes a lens go sharp in corners and why there is vignetting and why there is lens flare and then you will begin to understand why some lenses cost what they cost and others are cheap as chips and sooner or later will find their resting place at the bottom of your rubbish bin.

If you are shooting interior photography and you happen to have a Nikon camera there is only one lens you should consider and that is Nikon's master piece, the mighty 14mm – 24mm 1:2.8G. You'll get one sooner or later, trust me.

Are real estate agents out of their mind or just lazy. Too lazy to do some research and get a better deal. There are at least a dozen freelance photographers on the gold coast that will give you a way better deal for a fraction of that price. You will end up with better photos that are not just batched through Photoshop and had the ceilings whitened. The window view will look natural and not like a painting on the wall and the rooms are neat and tidy.

You can not just take out a business loan, buy $15.000 worth of photography gear, go on a 4 weeks course and think you have what it takes. Or maybe you can, looking at some of their bad photography work tells me it can be done and I understand that the guy has to charge a lot of money because he is sitting on some debt and he also has to send 40% of his earnings back to the franchiser. Yes that is 40%. You are your own boss but you have to pay 40% to the guy that gives you the job. Now what would you rather do? Walk around all day long and take photos then spend even more time in front of the computer at night to get it all enhanced or sit in some office picking up the phone and delegating work for 40%?

What I would do as an real estate agent is I would cut out the middle man and save 40% straight away. Then I would go and find a freelance guy like myself and get a better and more reasonable price product. I don't sit on a business loan and I also have other sources of income. I do this because I love what I do and I don't do it because I have to pay off a pile of debt and if a real estate agent still believes that people on the Internet spend more time looking at fancy interactive floor plans than looking at good property photos then keep paying $1200, it's ok with me.