Should I use DIY Apps for virtual staging?

The simple answer is yes absolutely, provided you find an app that is easy to use, inexpensive, gives you great results, allows you to modify things as per your requirements and most important doesn’t take too much of your time. In these times you may very well assume that such an app should exist, but he unfortunate truth is, you wont find an app that meets all these criteria

In order to understand why such an app doesn’t exist , its important to understand the process of virtually staging an image.

Detecting the perspective of the Image

The first step for any virtual staging tool is to identify the angle of the floor and walls. This allows the tool to place furniture accordingly with appropriate shadows and lighting. Unfortunately, with most tools this has to be done manually and is not really a user friendly process. Of course AI these days are able to do this process but then they are not 100% accurate and one must always remember Ai comes at the cost of GPU ( computing power ) and you will be bearing this cost.

Placing furniture

This is a simple step that many Virtual Staging apps might be able to help you with in a few scenarios. But lets assume a scene where only a part of a sofa needs to be visible as it covered by a wall of the house. Virtual staging tools do not allow for such scenarios. They only allow for a simple use case of an open space.

Lighting and Shadows

For this its important to understand the process of rendering out a Staged scene. Rendering is the process of creating a 2D or 3D image from a model using a computer program. Once the furniture is placed in a scene it needs to be rendered. There are typically two types of rendering processes. Ray Casting and Ray tracing. Without going too much in detail of the two, Ray tracing give you much realistic lights, shadows, and textures. Ray tracing comes at the cost of high GPU consumption. Any virtual staging tool you use, will use Ray Casting at best. We say best because most tools will simply stack your furniture over the base image and give you the final result. Which will not look realistic and thus defeats the purpose of staging the room

Post Production

Even the best photographers in the world, using the best cameras will always need to make some adjustments after the Photo is taken. Same is the case with using any app for virtual staging. Once an virtually staged room is rendered, you will need to up the highlights or down the shadows, increase brightness etc. All this has to be done on another app or software. This will require your time & experience

Time

Time spent on virtually staging using different tools is time not spent with a customer. If you feel you

"Do what you do best and outsource the rest." - Peter Drucker