How many times do you actually look up in a room to check on the color of the ceiling? Not often, do you? Well you don't have to most of the times because your brain tells you that it is a perfectly white ceiling. In our mind ceilings are perfectly bright white but in reality they are not. If a human brain gets challenged with a photo it can look at different things in different ways and if a photo of a room hasn't got that bright white ceiling something seems to look wrong, although it is not. Ceiling are not perfectly white in reality. Look up, I am 100% sure your ceiling is far from it too. It looks way more dark and gray than just plain white.

Anyway, when I started with real estate photography I did a lot of practicing in my own home and one thing I never got quite right was the look of those ceilings. Not the way they do look but the way they are supposed to look. I've tried everything, different lighting, different ways to bounce flashes. Nothing seemed to work until I figured out that those real estate photographers must cheat in some way and here is how they do it:

In the first picture you see the room the way the camera sees it (Picture 1). The ceiling was actually a bit whiter than it appears in this photo but because the room has beige walls the hallogene down lights get reflected and the color of the light changes. I did not use a flash in this shot, used my 14-24 Nikon and set the F stop to f/11 with 1/4s shutter speed, ISO 400. The photo is a little under exposed but I find that just right for future editing. So what you want to to now (Picture 2) is use the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop and create a new layer with just the ceiling. I go right into the corners where the walls meet the ceilings.

Select the new layer (Picture 3) and use a white balancing filter plugin to kill any colors. I use NIK filter plugin for Photoshop to do it. You will have to click around to get it right. Sometimes it works with the first click, sometimes it takes a few. After white balancing adjustments I usually give it a little bit more brightness and turn down the contrast a bit (Picture 4). Not a big difference but it makes the ceiling just that little bit brighter and lighter.