• On February 21, 2010
• 15 comments

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of virtual staging? Are you looking for a “do-it-all” software that will let you just drag and drop furniture into your photos? Well, unfortunately virtual staging isn’t that easy. Many people often ask us what software we use to do what we do. This article will shed a little light on how it’s all done. We’ve done a lot of investigating, research and development planning to find the highest quality virtual staging possible and this is what we found…

The Talent

There are a lot of things that go into a good quality virtual staging and there is no single piece of software that is capable of making the complex image manipulations on it’s own. Our most valuable resource for virtual staging is our team of talented designers. Virtual Staging Solutions employs a team of highly skilled and trained graphic designers and home stagers, that use a collection of different photo editing and 3D rendering tools. The software we use ranges from $2,500 to $18,000, as you can imagine this can be some pretty complex software with a steep learning curve. Most of our designers have 5+ years of experience working with the software. Our designers are first required to go through a 1-3 week internal training program that allows us to assess their skills and teaches them how to use our collection of software to create the highest quality virtual staging.

Design Factors

We’ve seen some people claiming to sell “virtual staging software” but really all they are selling is a generic collage making software and a few furniture images with only 1-2 different angles. As you can imagine this solution will create a lot of problems when you try to insert furniture at the correct perspective, an image of the front of a couch will not work in many rooms unless you want the couch directly in the middle of the photo without any variation in perspective or have the slightest degree of an angle.

The major design factors our designers have to account for are perspective, ensuring that the furniture matches up with the perspective and vanishing points of the room. They also need to account for light sources and consider the differences between natural and artificial light and how it will cast onto the furniture in the room to create highlights.

The light sources also play a major role in determining shadows and shadows are one of the most important factors in creating a realistic effect. Most generic graphic design tools and collage software can not make shadows or if they can, they can only make simple drop shadows that makes the furniture look like it has a black glow around it. This type of software is also not capable of evaluating the lighting of a room which is why they will cause the finished product to look like a cartoon instead of being photo-realistic.

This is why we’ve created our virtual staging service, to take all of the complex, hard work out of virtual staging for you. Simply send us your photos and you’re done, for only $197 you can get started today.

These are just a few of the hundreds of factors that need to be addressed during virtual staging, we hope this article answers the questions you have about virtual staging software and also sheds a light on the thought process and hard work that goes into what our designers do to provide you with the highest quality of virtual staging.

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We make vacant real estate beautiful...

Virtual Staging Solutions is the industry leader in Virtual Staging. We digitally and realistically place furniture into photos of vacant homes for sale. We'll help you sell your listing faster and for top dollar. All you need to do is send us your photos. Find out more here.